


Is he or Is he not?

by Omenthia_Arc



Series: Is he or is he not? [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: 5+1, And it makes him not think too much about things, Because Tony is a good dad, Betty is a good friend, But Only a Little Bit - Freeform, Fluff, Gen, Harley deserved his own cool dad, Howards A+ parenting (mentioned), Hurt Peter, I need to organise these tags once I'm finished, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark Friendship, James "Rhodey" Rhodes is a Good Bro, Jealous Harley, Memory Loss, Now including Harley Keen-star, Pepper has a crisis, Rhodey is a good uncle, Sensory Overload, Steve has a guilty conscience, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony is a good dad, Tony worries, and I named him Robert, and everyone falls for it, because she lost her memory, but probably not like you think, even if they aren't that close, he's sorry okay, steve rogers friendly, tags will update as I post
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:20:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25735693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omenthia_Arc/pseuds/Omenthia_Arc
Summary: Five times someone thought that Peter was Tony's biological son and one time everyone thought it.
Relationships: Betty Brant & Peter Parker, Harley Keener & Peter Parker, Harley Keener & Tony Stark, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark, Pepper Potts & Steve Rogers, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Peter Parker & Pepper Potts, Peter Parker & Pepper Potts & Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Steve Rogers, Peter Parker & Tony Stark, Steve Rogers & Tony Stark
Series: Is he or is he not? [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2118192
Comments: 90
Kudos: 578





	1. Rhodey

Theoretically, Rhodey knew that Tony didn’t have any kids. No matter how drunk or high he had gotten, he always had been careful about that.  
Practically though, he had just wandered into Tony’s workshop and had come face to face with a teenager with brown eyes and slightly wavy, brown hair. He had the same dear-in-headlights-look Tony sometimes sported when he was caught out doing something he better shouldn’t have, and he was wearing an old MIT-shirt that was most definitely Tony’s.

All in all, that would have been enough to let every alarm bell in his head go off, he had a smudge of grease on his cheek and was holding a screwdriver in his hand like it was a lifeline. Obviously he was working on something down here, and alone the fact that they were in Tony’s workshop led him to think it was something incredible complicated. Considering everything, this kid reminded him so much of Tony in their first year of MIT, it almost hurt.

Theoretically, Rhodey knew that Tony didn’t have any kids.  
Practically, he knew that if he had – even just one – it would very possibly look like the boy standing frozen in front of him. The boy who recovered first from suddenly coming face to face with each other.

“Oh my god! You’re the Iron Patriot! It is so awesome to meet you! Oh wow! Are you here for the armor? I helped Mis- Tony with the updates, I hope you’ll like it!”

Rhodey categorized the incoming information the same way he would on a mission – which meant damn fast – but he would still need a few more seconds to process whatever was going on here. He didn’t know the kid, did know even less how the hell he had gotten here, but he knew his best friend. The way this was going, he thought the chances that they would react similar to something were pretty high, and he needed more time. Enough time at least, to figure out what was going on, so he did what he would have done to distract Tony for a moment.

“I’m sure it’s awesome. Wanna walk me through what you guys did with it?”

It worked almost the same as it would have with the older model. The kid needed a little more encouragement – “I’m sure Tony would be fine if you tell me. He doesn’t want to go too much into it most of the time anyway.” – then he was off talking like a waterfall, spewing facts and numbers so fast that the only reason Rhodey even understood any of it was the years he had spent listening to Tony on his inventing binges.

While he listened, he thought about how the kid had clearly been conflicted about what to call Tony and how obvious i was how brilliant he was, maybe even a genius. Most likely a genius. Alone the way he was talking right now was evidence enough of that. If he really had helped Tony… well, Tony didn’t let just anyone work on either of their armors, genius or not. Certainly interesting. The kid had finished talking while he was thinking and was now looking at him with bated breath. He made sure to smile extra wide as he nodded. “That’s awesome, kid.”

The boy smiled, but only after a tiny micro-second frown had passed over his face. “Oh my god, Mr Iron Patriot, I am so sorry. I didn’t even introduce myself. I’m Peter.” The kid – Peter – almost fell over his feet in his haste to come over and shake Rhodey’s hand.

“Nice to meet you, Peter. Rhodey is just fine, by the way.” He had to hide his smile as he saw him mouth ‘awesome’.

In unusually perfect timing, Tony chose that moment to stumble through the door. He stilled for a moment when his eyes landed on Rhodey, but not when he saw Peter. So he had known that he would be here, that was expected, but it was a relief, nonetheless. “Oh good, you met my kid.”

For almost three seconds, he thought he must have misheard. Even though everything pointed to the contrary, he thought he must have misunderstood. Tony couldn’t just have said ‘my kid’. Then he saw Peter smile. It was a private little smile, not meant to be seen, and Rhodey remembered the frown from only moments earlier, when he himself had called him ‘kid’. He decided then and there that he wouldn’t be calling Peter ‘kid’ anymore – whatever was going on, that was obviously Tony’s nickname for … the kid. Okay, so he would work on it, but for now there were more pressing matters to attend to.

“Tony, can I talk to you for a moment?” He walked out without looking if his friend was following. A few feet down the corridor he went into an empty room and closed the door behind Tony. Before he could say anything, the other man was already speaking.

“Is this about the kid?” He already sounded slightly defensive, but that was not what Rhodes latched onto.

“Oh, so it’s the kid now, is it?” Tony stiffened, only slightly, but Rhodey had spent too much time with him to miss it.

“What exactly are you accusing me of here, Platypus?”

“Oh, don’t play dumb with me! You know exactly what I’m asking you!”

Tony crossed his arms over his chest. “Spell it out for me.”

Rhodey pinched his nose between his thumb and index finger, like he had done since the first day he had known Tony. “Please. Please, tell me you didn’t have a kid and ignored it until it could work in the shop unsupervised.”

Theoretically, he knew – had always known – that Tony would make a great dad. That he would never have done something like that.  
Practically, there was a child standing in the shop that he had never seen before. A child that looked a little like Tony and talked a lot like him. A child that would have been born somewhere in the middle of Tony’s wildest party days.

“What!” Tony dropped his arms and Rhodey just barely caught the hurt that crossed his face, before he schooled it away. “No! I wouldn’t have done that, you know that. That’s an A+ Howard move.”

Rhodey nodded. Took a breath. “Then explain who that child is.” Tony’s shoulders slumped and suddenly guilt flooded Rhodey. He almost took it back, but he had to know. Tony, however, seemed hesitant on sharing and Rhodey went right back to tensing his shoulders.

“I didn’t even know him a few months ago, ok?”

There was an undertone there that told him he should know what this meant, and he supposed he did. Just because Tony would never knowingly abandon his child, his _son_ , after all did not mean that there wouldn’t be a child sooner or later turning up.

“Jesus, Tony.” Back were his fingers, pinching his nose. Then he dragged his hand over his entire face and tried to calculate how many of his grey hairs had been Tony’s doing. It was probably too many to count. “Alright.” He tried to think, but Tony was already talking again.

“Listen, can we not make a big deal out of this? Please?” He had this Bambi look on his face, the one Rhodey could barely ever say no to.

“I just- I’m adjusting, and I know I made mistakes, believe me, I know, but I’m trying, okay? So, can we just – just leave it?” Jesus, this really was the same deer-in-headlights-look he had seen on the kid only minutes earlier. But he also looked - protective. Like he was asking Rhodey not to ruin this for him by being his usual lovingly-sceptical self, and if that didn't get to him, nothing ever would. He sighed. There was really only one thing he could do, was there? He gave in.

On the way back, Rhodey paused for a moment before he followed Tony back into the shop. He took a deep breath and tried to get from his agitated state of mind to the mindset he was in when he was with his sister’s family. Tony had been his little brother since almost day one, after they had met at MIT and if this kid was Tony’s kid - whether he had raised him or not, known about him or not - this boy was now his nephew. And god, wasn’t that crazy? He couldn’t imagine suddenly finding out that he had a son. Nephews though. And nieces. He could deal with that, he’d gone through that a few times already, no problem here.

Probably.

Maybe.

Ok so this might be a little more complicated than he had thought. Sue him, this was Tony's kid, he was expecting drama.

When he finally made it through the door, though, the most adorable picture greeted him. Peter and Tony crouched together over one of Tony’s old cars, Tony’s hand on the boy’s shoulder and both of them radiating contentment. Right now, in that exact moment in which he made Rhodey’s little brother smile like that, like he hadn't seen anywhere near often enough in all the time he knew him, in that moment the teenage boy became Rhodey’s family. And family, in his experience, was worth all the drama they brought with them

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone! I wanted to write a fic like this for ages and now l've finally done it. I hope you had as much fun reading this as l had writing it. Kudos and comments are welcome, so feel free to leave as many of those as you want.  
> This will be a 5+1 format. I have ideas for all the chapters still to come and a few already written, waiting for editing. However, it is that time of the year (exams are the worst), so I don’t know when the next one is gonna be up.


	2. Steve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve heard about Peter long before he ever met the boy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, the second chapter.

It had been a couple of weeks since the rest of the Avengers had returned to the compounds and finally the big hello had died down a bit. Steve Rogers was slowly easing back into his routines and getting used to being home again. He'd just returned from his morning run when he entered the kitchen and found Bruce, sitting at the counter, reading one of his scientific journals over a cup of tea.

“Morning.”

Bruce barely looked up from the thing he was reading, but Steve did not take it personally, he knew to wait patiently for Bruce to realise someone was even there. After a minute he closed the magazine and gave Steve his full attention.

“Sorry, just- an interesting article. Morning.” Steve nodded. He knew how the scientists on the team could get when they were engrossed in one of these things that Steve barely even spoke the right language for.

“How are you? We haven’t had much time to talk since you came back.”

Steve smiled a little. It was just like Bruce to make sure everyone was okay. He knew the other man was worried about the relationships between the group. It was a good thing they had someone who hadn’t been in Germany; Steve hoped it would make reacclimating to each other easier.

“I’m fine, I just feel like I missed a lot. Tell me, is there anything I haven’t heard already?” He made sure that his voice sounded even and calm, but he couldn’t help being nervous. He had this feeling that he had been missing something, and he couldn’t get it out of his head, no matter how often he told himself that it was probably only because he had been gone so long.

It was in the way Tony was gone for days at a time, back in New York, in the Tower, even though he had wanted to sell the thing. It was in the way he was in the workshop and talking to FRIDAY or on the phone and then just stopped, mid-sentence, when Steve walked in. It was also in the doors, that wouldn’t open for him at random intervals and then be freely accessible the next day and the myriad of new protocols that seemed to have no use other than to confuse the shit out of him. Natasha had told him to give it time. That Tony just needed to get used to them again, to heal his wounds. That he would be fine, and Steve should stop worrying, stop seeing things that weren’t there. 

Of course he wasn’t stupid enough to believe her. She was just trying to calm him down, to assure him everything would be fine, but he knew that if he noticed all these things, she did too. There was no way she missed these things, but she kept telling him to let it rest, so he hadn’t gone prodding at it, like he normally would. Still, there was something. And the Bruce might just have been his last resort to find out about it without being too intrusive and ruin the little progress Tony and he had made in forgiving and understanding each other.

Bruce seemed to think for a moment.

“Really there hasn’t happened much. You heard the highlights already, you know. Tony and Pepper’s engagement, moving everything up here from New York.” There was a slight hesitation but then he said, “Well, I don’t know if anyone mentioned the kid, yet?”

For a second, Steve went ridgid. The tone in which he said it was careful, but Steve had heard the deep fondness anyway. Plus, he said ‘the kid’. Not _A_ kid, _The_ Kid. As in a specific kid, being around, belonging to someone. Whose kid?

“Which kid?” He didn’t know how he managed to sound so unconcerned, but he thought it sounded alright – until he saw Bruce’s face. Maybe he hadn’t sounded as nonchalant as he had thought.

“So, I’m guessing this is a no. Really it’s not that surprising, there were a lot of things that needed to be discussed and it’s really-” Bruce didn’t finish the sentence as if he wasn’t entirely sure how it would have ended himself. An awkward silence fell over the two and Steve scrambled to find something to say.

“Was I really gone that long?” It was meant to be a joke, but even he could hear that it sounded more...astonished? Surprised in the least. He didn’t want to ask outright, because _he should have been here for something like that!_ and he desperately wanted to know whose. _Whose? Whose? Whose?_

For a moment Bruce didn’t seem to understand what he was getting at, but then he started to splutter.

“Oh no! It’s not that recent. I mean it’s a pretty recent development, with Tony and everything, but the kid himself is not recent. What I am trying to say is that he is a teenager. Fifteen. But I think his birthday is coming up soon.”

So, Tony’s then. And not a baby. He still should have been here. He wondered who the mother was, but he knew about Tony’s escapades before Pepper was a thing and he doubted he was going to meet her. _Oh my god, Tony has a kid. Tony has a half-grown kid and I wasn’t here for it._

For a moment he wondered if Tony had had a kid the whole time and had just kept it a secret, like Clint. But then his common-sense kicked in and he was sure that he would have known. Tony would have told him. And, oh god, one of his best friends was a father and he hadn’t known. Again, just like Clint, only they had _lived_ together. All of them, in the tower. Somehow he doubted that even the great Tony Stark would have been able to hide a child living in the same building as them. Also, Bruce had said it was a recent development, surely he would not have meant to say the recentness only attended to anyone knowing about it.

His thoughts were spiralling, he knew. He tried to keep calm, at least on the outside, but he wasn’t sure if it was working. He could feel Bruce’s gaze linger on him.

“And the kid,” he hesitated. He didn’t know the kid’s name.

“Peter” Bruce supplied and Steve took a deep breath.

“Right. Does Peter live with Tony, or…?” he let the question fade out.

“Oh no, he lives with his aunt in Queens.” Bruce’s face scrunched up. “Just, don’t ask about his parents, he doesn’t much like talking about it. “

Steve nodded vigorously. Of course, that would have to be a difficult situation. When he lived with the aunt, his mother must be a touchy subject, not even speaking of suddenly being confronted with being the son of Tony Stark. If he hadn’t known already, that was. _God what a mess._ He would have liked to talk to Tony about it, apologise for not being there. Meet the kid - Peter, he reminded himself. But he also knew that it wasn’t a good time right now. He had to give things time to settle, before he got to such serious subjects. The suddenly locked doors were a clear enough sign of that, and he couldn’t even blame Tony. Of course he’d be weary about his son meeting Steve, after Siberia - guilt pulled at his stomach.

It wasn’t only the locked doors, though, that suddenly made sense. Tony’s whole behaviour over the past weeks, his absences and the calls. Of course he would want to spend time with Peter, and if Peter lived in New York - well, he wondered if Peter ever stayed at the Tower when Tony was in town. Probably. He had definitively been here. Most likely behind locked doors, kept away from them. Or, more likely, they had been kept away from him. _Shit!_

As if Bruce could sense his despair, he started telling him more.

“Peter spends a lot of time with Tony when he’s staying in the tower. It’s a Stark Industries location now, mainly Research and Development, but Tony has kept the penthouse. They spent hours working together in the lab. I think Pete might be even more intelligent than the man himself.”

Steve was still nodding. More intelligent than Tony? That seemed hard to believe, but he had met Shuri and if there was a second kid smarter than Stark, of course it could only be his own. 

Tony had a kid. He was gonna need some time to wrap his head around that. He couldn’t wait to meet him. If the way Bruce spoke about him was any indication, he had to be one hell of a kid. He wondered-

“Pepper…?” Again, he didn’t finish the question, but again the other man didn’t need him to.

“Pepper loves the kid; we all do really. We don’t get to see him much, being holed up in the lab with Tony most of the time, but he’s really great.”

Steve could picture it. A kid with brown hair and eyes, sitting beside Tony in the lab, the same glint in his eyes that the older man always got when he was knee-deep in creating. God this was so weird. He needed a moment alone. He needed to mull this over in his head.

“I’m gonna go grab a shower. I'll see you around.” He almost blurted it out and ignored Bruce’s curious glance as he left the room as fast as he could without running.

It took a long time before Steve met Peter, and even then he was about ninety percent sure that it had been more of an accident. It _was_ the middle of the night after all. 

Steve hadn’t been able to sleep. He had never slept much, first because he could barely breathe and had often been woken by coughing fits because of some illness or another. Then, once that wasn’t a problem anymore, the nightmares had come.

At first there had not been too many, but more had come, until there was a wide variety of them to circle through. Right after he had woken up this side of the ice, almost all of them had been pierced by utter coldness and Peggy’s voice, calling out for him.  
Today, like so often over the last two years, it had been cold steel closing around his throat, silver on some nights and red on others, cold water, and in the distance Tony’ s face, looking so utterly betrayed and hurt and horrified. The words ‘I was your friend, too’ still echoed through his skull an hour after he had woken up. 

Finally he gave up on going back to sleep and got up. Logically he knew that the best thing for him to do was to let in a hot bath and seek the warmth of the water. A few times when he had done exactly that, he had dozed off again, comforted by the huge difference the temperature of the water made compared to the cold nightmare enclosing him everytime he closed his eyes, and safe in the knowledge that the tub was too small for him to slip under water while sleeping.

He barely had to think about it before he threw on a hoodie instead and made his way to the gym. He was too restless tonight for a bath to be in any way tempting.  
Long before he made it even close to the gym entrance, he heard metal clink against metal, like someone was jostling a bag full of pipes. He absently wondered what Tony was doing with the equipment now, when the clinking was interrupted by a loud bang, followed by heavy cursing. Steve took off in a run, racing to reach the gym and see what happened. 

The nearer he came, the more the person in there, because whoever it was, it was _not_ Tony, tempered off in their cursing. By the time he’d finally reached the door, there was none whatsoever. Instead, when he walked in, he saw a teenager staring glumly at the equipment he seemed to have been messing with. 

For one second, standing in the door, he wondered what he should think of the scene in front of him, before his brain made the connection between what a teenager was doing in the middle of the night in the Tower and the one teenager it possibly could be, and he knew even less what to do then. 

It was more than clear that Tony did _not_ want them to meet. This certainly wasn’t the introduction he had thought might happen one of these days. Tony wasn’t even there, and he couldn’t help but wonder if he even knew that the kid was walking around in the middle of the night, tinkering in the gym even. On the other hand he was sure that if he was not yet supposed to meet him, FRIDAY would have certainly redirected him.

Making up his mind, he stepped further into the room. He thought he had moved completely silent, but the boy turned around before he could decide how to make him aware of his presence without startling him. For a moment they stared at each other. The boy mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “How is this happening, again?”

“What?” he blurted out and immediately wanted to kick himself. _Eloquent, Rogers, real smooth!_

The boy grinned a little awkwardly at him and for the first time, he realises how very much he didn’t look like Tony. Sure, there were certain similarities. They had the same hair and eye colors, similar height, and the same curious look in their eyes, as if they were always asking questions about everything in their head. But if he would go only by these markers, Tony and Bruce would be brothers.

Ignoring his own icapability to react in a normal manner to meeting a teenager, he tried again. “You must be Tony’s kid. Peter, right?” _Now, that was certainly better._

“I- yeah, that’s me. And your Captain America, sir.”

“Please, Steve is just fine.” He finally moved again, crossing the last few metres to offer his hand. Peter looked at it strangely, before shaking it carefully. He dropped his hand again and moved back a step, tucking both hands behind his back and staring at Steve. He wasn't sure what to do next, so he waited for Peter to say something, but the boy wasn’t really forthcoming. Desperate for something to break the awkward silence, he looked around for something - anything - to talk about and finally he remembered why he had come running in the first place. 

Behind Peter he noticed one of the treadmills. A disarray of cables hang out of where the display was supposed to be. The casing at the bottom lay a little to the side and between the maschine and the casing was a trail of what could only be the innards of what had once been - and was clearly no longer - a working apparatus.

“What are you doing?” 

Peter whirled around, looked at the machine, then over his shoulder back to Steve. 

“Ahm. Right, because this is a weird thing to do, right? To be in the gym, in the middle of the night. Though, you’re here, too.” He whirled back again, facing Steve with a horrified look on his face. “Not that you’re weird, I didn’t mean that. It’s just weird that I am tinkering on the treadmill. But Tony said that I could, I promise.”

Steve raised a single eyebrow, more because this kid was not how he had pictured him than because he didn’t believe him. Mostly because he had just pictured a smaller version of Tony. Peter, though, seemed to think that he was questioning him.

“Okay, right, he technically meant that we would do it together, in the morning, but he didn’t explicitly forbid me from coming down, and I couldn’t sleep, and I thought if I could get a first look at this thing, then I wouldn’t embarrass myself tomorrow, right? Only then I kinda went into this hyperfocus and I really wanted to know how this works, and I started pulling things out and now I’m not entirely sure how to put it back, so now I am definitely going to embarrass myself tomorrow!”

“Oh!” He seemed really nervous, which made him seem even less than his father. Tony had never let Steve see him nervous. 

“I’m sure Tony won’t mind. God knows that he has taken apart things before and didn’t put them back together again.” Steve was pretty sure that had rather been because he had lost focus and interest in his projects, but the kid was already nervous, he didn’t need to know that. Not that it made much of a difference, he still looked unhappy.

“Listen, son, I’m sure your dad has made his own mistakes. I bet if you asked FRIDAY, she could tell you a few stories about him. He goes into hyperfocus, too, you know.”

“My- my dad?” Peter sounded a little faint. Suddenly Steve wondered if maybe he wasn’t supposed to know about Peter being Tony’s son. In the end he didn’t even know how long ago Tony had even found out about his son; maybe Bruce had told him things he shouldn’t have. Alone the fact that the press hadn’t yet found out about them had to mean that only a small number of people knew. Either way, Peter was clearly flustered, so he decided to let it go. 

“Excuse me, FRIDAY, is Tony still up?” 

“Yes, Captain Rogers, the Boss is in his workshop. Shall I inform him that you will bring the young Master Peter by?” There was a funny tone in the AI’s voice, but she had been curt with him since the Rogues had been back, so he didn’t think too long about it.

“Young Mast- Right. Right, okay. Are we doing this? Am I really-?” Peter still sounded a little faint.

"I really think you should just talk to him. I really can't imagine he would be mad about this. Okay?" Steve looked to the boy; he looked even more flustered than before. This time, though, he gained his composure. He looked a little calculating to Steve, before he seemed to make up his mind about something. Then he broke out in a grin that made him look a little more like Tony. With the entrails of the treadmill they left behind and that grin on his face, he could think up almost a dozen stories about someone dragging Tony out of his workshop and right onto a red carpet. 

As they made their way to the ‘shop, Steve kept one eye on Peter. He was only a little concerned about him, now, but he also wanted to make sure that he wasn’t uncomfortable with going to Tony. He seemed fine, tough. There were no more nerves visible in his face, and he was still grinning.

When they made it, Tony had obviously been waiting for them; the music had been toned down from it’s usual deafening heights.The other man was working on something, but even from the door Steve could tell that he had held an eye out for them. As soon ans they were through the door, Tony swivelled around in his chair. 

“Should you not be in bed?” He raised one eyebrow at Peter. The kid smiled a little sheepishly.

“Listen, you know how you said earlier that if I could get the treadmill tomorrow in one try, you might let me fly the suit?”

Tony only kept looking imploringly at him. “Ahm, so I thought I could get a little look in beforehand, right? So when I couldn’t sleep, I went down to have a look.”

Tony was clearly trying to suppress a grin now, which Peter obviously didn’t see, because he was currently the picture book version of a puppy with a guilty conscience.

“Are we cheating now, Parker? Are you succumbing to dirty tricks?”

“I know I shouldn’t have. I just really wanted to have a chance to fly the suit. Not even far, you know? Just maybe hovering a little in the lab would have been awesome. Please, please let me try anyway?” he threw a careful glance over to Steve, who was still standing a few steps behind him. “Please, dad?”

If Steve had not been distracted, he might have noticed the conspiratorial tone in Peter’s voice, might have even noticed the mischief dancing in his eyes. As it was, Tony had started coughing so abruptly and so loudly that Steve was distracted. Distracted by jumping forward and making sure that his friend didn’t suffocate because his son had apparently called him ‘dad’ for the first time. No wonder the kid had looked so baffled earlier. 

“Alright, kid,” Tony said, once he had finally stopped coughing. “Alright. If you want to play like that, you can forget every chance at ever getting close to my suit.” He was still wheezing a little.

“What? No!” Peter held his hands up in surrender. “I didn’t say it because of that, I swear!”

Now the kid was almost as red in the face as Tony. Steve was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable being there. He had the distinct feeling that this was a conversation those two should have between themselves. 

“I’ll leave you two to it, then,” he said while beating a hasty retreat.

Had he not been in such a hurry, he might have noticed the way Peter tipped his head in his direction, a sheepish smile on his face that was as good as a wink. He might have noticed the way Tony’s eyes followed Peter’s direction before he started grinning, too.  
As it was, he only slowed down once he was out of earshot; looking back, all he saw was a father and son huddling together. If he had known that they were conspiring against him, he might not even have minded.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, poor, oblivious Steve. Though writing that misunderstanding with Bruce might have been my favourite part about this chapter.
> 
> Now, first of all, thank you all for reading and kudoing (?Kudosing? Is there a verb for this?) and commenting. I was so happy that you liked the first chapter! :D
> 
> I'm not totally in love with every bit of this one, but if I'd kept working on it, I think I would have only made it worse. I hope you enjoyed reading it anyway.
> 
> I'm gonna be honest. Since I finished this faster than I had expected, I thought about making a fixed update schedule. But the next chapters aren't yet as well prepared as this one was, and I might still have an exam in early october (depending on if I pass the one next week) so updates will remain irregular. I'm sorry and I hope you understand.
> 
> I'm not sure if I should explain this or not, but Tony says workshop because that's what I remember him calling it in the films. Steve says it too, because Tony introduced him to the space, but Bruce and Peter say lab, because they have a more lab-science kind of background. Peter also sticks to it to annoy Tony a little. :)


	3. Harley Keenstar (I know thats not how it's spelled, but it is now)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the Vulture vanishes from prison, Tony freaks and sends the Parkers to stay with the Keeners for a while. Harley draws his own conclusions about what kind of secret sent them into hiding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys. I know its been a while (almost four months, ouch). Im really sorry about that, real life's been kicking my ass lately and this chapter simply would. not. cooperate. But I really love Harley, and I wanted this chapter to be good. It's still not exactly what I had in mind, but it's want I finally wrangled out of the characters, after starting from the beginning four times. And as a little compensation for the wait, this chapter is longer than the first two together, so at least there's that. I hope you like it :)
> 
> Also, I'm really blown away by the reception this has received and that is mainly what kept me coming back to this even when I wanted to throw my laptop out the window. I really hope that the other chapters will come faster, but at the moment I'm not sure of anything. I do promise you, though, I will finish this fic, one way or the other.

The day the Parkers came over from New York, Harley woke up and was immediately in a bad mood. He didn't even know why - only really, he did a little bit, didn't he?

Because he had never before disliked someone before he had even met them, not even speaking of wanting to, but he kinda wished he could dislike Peter Parker. And while he did his best to admit to noone, least of all himself, that this was clearly something to do with Tony, it wasn’t really like there was much else it possibly could be. Like he had said, he had never even met the kid, and what he had heard from Tony had actually sounded pretty cool.

Like Harley himself, he was insanely intelligent, even more so for a teenager. While Harley had concentrated most of his ideas around mechanics, Parker was into Bio-Chemistry and biological engineering. He had to admit that he had been a little impressed, he certainly wouldn't have the patience to stare at beakers all day. 

Besides all the science stuff, Parker sounded like a decent human being, which was actually quite impressive. Tony had great hopes for humanity as a whole but Harley had always been under the impression that he liked precious few people as individuals. The way the guy gushed about the kid made it pretty clear that he was, like Harley himself, under the exceptions to that rule. 

So, considering all these things, he and Parker should have been able to get along famously. In fact he had been quite excited to finally meet him. Sure, it hadn’t been exactly good circumstances, even if he didn’t know more about the whole thing other than that they had needed to get out of the city for a while, but he was really happy that he would finally meet Parker. And as hard as he ignored it, he knew precisely when that had changed. 

* * *

His mum had thrown the phone at him as soon as he had come through the door, which meant it could only be one person.

“Hey Tony!”

“Hi potato-kid.” Harley had rolled his eyes. That nickname had been kinda funny a few years ago, but he had long since abandoned improving on one potato gun after another. He had diversified his experiments, trying out all kinds of things with the workshop-garage that Tony always kept well stocked with everything a mechanic's heart could desire. 

“Let me guess, you’re still stressing that it really isn’t too much that you put the Parkers here for a while. So, instead of doing something useful, like resolving what situation is the reason for all this in the first place, you’re calling mom risking annoying her to make sure for the 100th time it really isn’t a bother?!”

“One day you will have to stop referring to the Parkers like things that I send over with the mail,” Tony had said with a heavy sigh, but also with clear amusement in his voice. 

“Yes, but today is not that day. And that little distraction attempt of yours was truly pitiful.”

They had spoken a lot lately - as far as Harley could tell because Tony was nervous about him getting into colleges, since Harley would finish High School next year. Tony seemed as determined to see Harley in MIT as he himself, maybe even more. 

Consequently, they had little left to talk about, but the look his mum had given him as she gave him the phone had clearly communicated that she would strangle Tony next she saw him if he called just one more time before their guests arrived. So he took the conversation into the ‘shop and did his best to distract the guy. 

“Please, tell me you’re at least annoying the Parkers just as much as us. I’m pretty sure Robert can’t take the anticipation anymore.”

“It’s rather the other way around. Pete is getting on my nerves these days. There really isn’t anyone else I can annoy right now but you guys.Your Stepdad will survive.”

Harley couldn’t help but laugh at that. “You’re totally whipped whenever it comes to Parker, what could he possibly do to be getting on your nerves?”

Parker was always a surefire way to distract Tony at any given moment. 

Tony snorted, but Harley knew that he only did it to suppress the fondness. He wasn’t sure if Tony was lying to himself or if he was concerned Harley would be jealous, but he always did his best not to let show how much he actually loved that kid. He wasn’t even marginally successful.

“He threw a few chemicals together - his words, not mine, can you believe that? - and invented this absolutely insane fabric. It’s completely bulletproof but with a few more tweaks it could look like everyday fabric. He handed it to me, thought it might be usable for undercover agents and such things. I don’t know for sure what he expected, but he went a little haywire when I applied for a patent in his name. Now he’s a nervous wreck 24/7 and will just not calm down until we get a response. Do you have any idea how long it takes to hear back from the US patent office?”

At that moment, Harley honestly didn’t know why, but his mood had suddenly gone down for the count. And it hadn’t gotten any better for the rest of the day. Since he had hung up when his mum had called him back into the house for dinner, his excitement about finally meeting Peter had petered out. So much so, that he couldn’t even smile about the stupid pun. 

* * *

The Parkers arrived a day later and Harley hadn't recovered yet from his ruined mood yesterday.

He’d fully intended to show Parker his ‘shop as soon as he had put his bags down. It was the only thing he could think of that they could do, and honestly probably the easiest way for them to bond. But then their plane had been delayed - and Harley would mock Tony about that as soon as possible, what did he have a private plane for if it then got delayed anyways? So, instead, they made it just in time for dinner. His mother and Peter’s aunt insisted on eating first. Which was a bummer, because it meant that they were stuck in that utterly boring conversation.

Once Mrs. Parker-call-me-May had asked the fateful question - ‘So, how did you two meet?’ - it had been doomed to be a mind numbing evening. 

Robert had come through town on business, meaning he had meant to drive right through without stopping once, when his car had broken down. He had met Mary Keener in the local supermarked, to complete the most mundane meet-cute ever. They had gone on one date and Harley had been sure that he would never see the guy again. Only, he had shown up not long after for a second date and they hadn’t been able to get rid of him since. 

That was the whole story. His parents, though, told the story with all the embellishments of people in love, including the ‘I knew as soon as I saw her’ and all the ‘It was so romantic’ and the telling both sides of the story at the same time. With May’s own comments and memories of her meeting her husband, they didn’t stop talking during dinner once.

Harley himself hadn’t known anywhere near as instantaneously. The first few months he hadn’t been anything but hostile even once, even after Tony had done a background check that had come back squeaky clean. 

“Tony had a background check done on you?” May asked incredulously. Robert laughed. He always took the humorous approach to the matter of Tony’s influence on their lives, which had been the first big point in his favour. 

“I understand why he was nervous,” he said. “ That was less than a year after that whole Mandarin business. I would have been wary, too, if suddenly someone had taken interest in the only people I’d had contact with here. Especially keeping in mind who he is and what he sees every day in his job. I can’t imagine he has a whole lot of trust left what people are concerned. He must have seen some of the scum of the earth while on duty.”

Harley always found it a little amusing how Robert would talk about Tony’s job as if he were simply in some kind of law enforcement.

“Not that it helped any with bringing Harley around,” his mother added, grinning and brushing over his hair on the way to get new drinks for everyone. 

He had half a mind to protest, but she was right, of course. Even after he had stopped being passive aggressive, he had spent months waiting for the other shoe to drop and for Robert to leave. 

The Parkers weren’t laughing in a mean way though, so he decided to just let it go. 

“So, Peter, do you wanna see my workshop?” he asked instead. He knew that his mother didn't like it when he went out again so late, not after she had busted him for not going to bed at all for three nights in a row. Now he had better chances, though, because she knew that he wanted to show Peter the ‘shop and maybe she would let them flee this conversation before it got worse. She did, if only with a stern reminder not to spent the whole night in there.

* * *

For the rest of the evening, Harley shooed an impressed Peter from one corner of the shop to another, until they finally landed in front of the computer.

“Oh, you have one of Tony’s systems. Maybe you can show me a few tricks. I’m okay with most computers, nothing like my friend Ned, but okay. I haven’t gotten a hang of that thing yet.” He looked so hopeful when he looked up at Harley that he couldn’t do anything but shrug his shoulders and say, “Yeah, sure, no problem.” He grabbed a second chair to drag to the computer station.

For a while they sat in front of the screen and talked. First about the programs Harley was showing him but soon enough they were swapping stories about Abby, who was off at some fancy boarding school, and Peter’s friends back in New York. Maybe that they were getting along so much faster than he had expected could be made responsible for what came out of his mouth next.

“So, what’s the deal here? Is someone trying to kill you guys? Because Tony wouldn’t say a word beyond that you needed to get out of the city.”

As soon as it had slipped out he wanted to bite his tongue, even more so when he saw the look on the kid’s face. And he knew that Peter was only about a year younger than HArley himself, but that was hard when he donned a look like that. He had never seen anyone look quite as much like a little puppy. 

“Sorry, you don’t have to tell me. It’s okay.”

Peter shrugged. “No, that’s alright. I should at least tell you something. It’s the least I can do after you took us in.”

“You really don’t have to, I swear. I was just running my mouth off.”

“I want to. Just, I promised Tony I wouldn’t tell anyone this one thing, so I don’t know exactly how to explain this.” He took a deep breath and for a moment neither of them said anything. Then Peter seemed to have made a decision. 

“Someone found something out. Something about me. And he could have used that to hurt me and the people I care about. And because he tried something really stupid, that had only a little to do wih what he knew about me, he went to prison. Tony was already not happy that he knew, even though he promised he wouldn’t ever tell a soul. He knew what people could do with that, and he said he didn’t want that on his conscience.”

Peter seemed to be deep in thought for a second.

“You believed him?”

“I did, yeah. I still do.”

“Then what is all the fuss about?”

“Well, for one, Tony always wanted more assurance than just me believing him. But mostly there is this other guy who is a really bad guy. And Tony thinks that he may have guessed that one thing about me, at least in the vaguest of terms. It’s probably more wishful thinking that he finally might have something than anything else.”

“But then, wouldn’t it tip him off even more when you two suddenly just vanish? That’s as good as saying that he was right and as soon as you come back he’ll want to make a grab for you even more.”

“Yeah, normally you’d probably be right. Only that first guy vanished from prison and now Tony thinks the other guy somehow got his fingers on him and if that’s true, then it’s only a matter of time before he knows too.”

A full five seconds, Harley just stared at the other boy. Then, “Well, shit.” 

Peter laughed a little shakily. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“So, Tony is in New York trying to find the not-as-bad-guy and take out the really-bad-guy?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“And there is nothing we can do?”

“No, not from here, at least.”

Harley nodded. “Well, then I might as well show you how to use this system. 

* * *

That first evening set the tone for much of the rest of their time. The first few days, Harley still had to go to school, but when he came home, they ate and made their way to the workshop. Peter was too polite to use it on his own and instead sat in the kitchen doing homework and working on his own ideas.

Then, when school was finally over, they spent almost every minute of the day either eating or working in the shop. It was glorious. The amount of work they got done. Largely because there was an extra pair of hands to help out for the more tricky parts, but also because his mom let them work there for way longer than she normally would when he was alone. He wasn’t quite sure if it was because she didn’t want to discuss this in front of guests, or that she didn’t want to try and make rules for Peter to follow. Maybe it was just the fact that for once, Harley wasn’t spending all his conscious time alone in there. Yeah, the more he thought about it, the more likely that last one seemed. 

Having an extra pair of hands made it even more frustrating when he was elbows deep in his newest robot, his teeth clamped around a screwdriver the size of his little finger while Peter was gone to get snacks when a phone rang. For a moment he tried to ignore it but it was obnoxiously loud. By the fourth ring it finally stopped. Two seconds later it started again. Harley groaned and the screwdriver fell out of his mouth. Great. 

Fuming just a little bit, he carefully extracted his hand from the bowels of the machine. He made it across the room just as the ringing stopped again. He waited a second. When it didn’t start ringing he turned back to the worktable. He took the first step, and it started again, even louder than before. He whirled around, grabbed the phone, swiped across the screen while lifting it to his ear.

“WHAT?” he was nearly screaming, but he’d been really annoyed before the stupid phone wouldn’t shut up. Now he was more angry than annoyed, which was probably also the reason he didn’t even realise that it was not _his_ phone that he’d answered. 

There was a second of silence, then Tony’s voice was in his ear. 

“Wow, calm down there. You okay?”

Harley rubbed his free hand over his eyes. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just a little annoyed. Doodle isn’t working the way I want him to.”

“I’ll never understand how you come up with the names for your bots. Can he even draw?” Tony was laughing, but there was a little bit of an edge in it. 

“No, but more importantly: at least I don’t give them stupid accents. What’s up? You sound weird.”

“Where’s Peter?” Harley frowned and pulled the phone away from his ear. Yeah, that was Peter’s phone. Which was not what caught his attention, though. It was the caller information. It didn’t exactly say what he expected it to. _Mhm_. Deciding to ignore that for now, he put the phone to his ear again.

“Peter’s getting snacks. He’ll be back in a minute. Has something happened with the bad guy or the really bad guy?”

“What? Did Peter tell you about all that? Jesus, the kid really doesn’t know how to keep a secret.”

“Should he have?” Now there was a little bit of an edge in Harley’s voice.

“Mhm? No, not really, I just wanted to see if he could.”

“Well, not really. Sorry. He didn't tell what the big-big secret is though, if that's helping. Just that there is one that kicked all this into action.” 

“Well. That’s something I guess.” 

He wouldn’t tell Tony that Peter still gave away the big-big secret by putting it into his phone for everyone to see at chance. He wouldn’t risk another look from Peter’s puppy dog eyes.

“Is there something else? Doodle still wants a lot of attention.”

“No, that’s alright, just tell Pete to call me back as soon as possible.”

“Will do. Bye.” He didn’t wait for Tony to say anything else and hung up. 

Five minutes later, Peter walked back in, the arms full of different snacks. 

“Robert is awesome. He showed me where you guys hide all the best snacks. He gave me the chocolate, even though it’s his favourite. He said we’d need it more with us inventing all this stuff and everything” he was grinning like an idiot. 

Something in Harley eased a little at the words. Yeah, Robert was pretty great, and he suspected that if he wouldn’t have him, his reaction to what he saw a minute ago would be rather different. It made it easier to be honestly teasing instead of mean when he said, “I accidentally answered your phone. It was your dad. He says to call him back.”

Peter’s face fell. “Ah. Ehm.” 

When Harley said nothing else on the topic, he smiled a little unsure, as if he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. “Uhm, so, I can explain that? It’s. Right, my friends-” 

“Yeah, you don’t need to explain that. I get it. All good.”

“Oh. Okay. Yeah.” Peter looked a little more self-assured, but not by much. Harley took mercy on him and led the way back to the worktable. “Put the snacks over there, okay? I need your help with this, real quick.”

“Yeah, okay. One sec.” Peter dumped the dozen bags on the table by the door and followed Harley to where he had already plunged his arm back into Doodle's body.

“Can you get the screwdriver and fasten this part here?” He was already holding the two stubborn pieces together and Peter was fast in tightening all the right screws. “Great, thanks.”

Peter nodded, still looking a little bit like he was waiting for something bad to happen. When it didn’t, he got back to his own work and they didn’t talk about it while they worked right through to dinner.

* * *

After they had eaten, Peter had finally remembered to call Tony and had come back with the news that Tony had managed to get the not quite as bad guy back. He would be going back to prison and the really bad guy would be locked away somewhere where they could throw away the key. All was well and the Parkers could return to New York without worrying, after only a few weeks with the Keeners. Tony would come the day after tomorrow and stay the weekend, before taking them home. 

It was only later, when Harley was lying in bed that he thought about earlier again.

Harley still didn’t know what the whole story was there, but in the end, he was satisfied knowing that Tony had handled it and it seemed like a good end to the whole thing. What kept his mind occupied, though, was the ‘Dad’ in the caller ID in Peter’s phone.

It made sense, he guessed. They kind of looked similar, with the soft, curly brown hair, similar height and even their faces were similar. 

Even more so when he couldn't help himself and google until he found a picture of Tony as a teenager. The resemblance was incredible, really, and suddenly he wondered why he hadn’t thought of this earlier. Because then there was the most obvious thing. Their minds. 

Harley himself had a genius level intellect, but the things Tony could do were on a completely different level. And he had seen evidence of something similar in Peter over the last weeks. Alone that one formula he had gotten a glance of one day after school was an indication of how intelligent he really was. There wasn’t much to think about, really. In hindsight, it was all so obvious. It also explained why the Parkers were here.

Tony was a little paranoid, as his first reaction to Robert had shown. If this guy had found out that Peter was Tony’s son, and if that worse guy had known that the first one knew something that would give him the upper hand over Tony - of course he would fear the worst - kidnapping, threat of torture, blackmail. It was no wonder Tony had sent them into hiding. 

So why couldn’t Harley just accept it as fact and let it go?

He threw himself around, so that he was staring at the wall rather than into his room. 

If he was completely honest, it was probably because for a while after he had met Tony, he desperately wanted him to be his dad. He’d been too old to have any fantasies that Tony was really his biological father, that he just hadn’t known and now they had found each other because of destiny or any other such nonsense. But he had kinda wished that Tony could be his dad in other ways. 

He had come by sometimes, but more importantly, he had called a lot, made sure that they had everything they needed. He had shown interest, something Harley’s sperm donor hadn’t done long before he’d finally done a runner; so he had cast Tony in the role of the father the universe clearly owed him. The fact that the man didn’t have any children himself made it so much easier to think maybe Tony sought the same kind of connection. 

Right now he wondered if he had also been so eager to get rid of Robert in the beginning because of all that. Considering that he had delegated Tony’s role in his life to a fun, rich uncle when he had warmed up to Robert, the answer was probably yes. 

An annoying and unwanted voice in his brain threw in the question if that made Peter his cousin and he groaned. He wasn’t a fan of that voice.

He _was_ doubly glad, though, that the first thing Peter had done after Harley had found out was saying how cool Robert was. Even if he hadn’t done it on purpose, it had reminded him that he was actually really happy with how his life was going right now.

Still, since that damn call he had wondered what this meant for his relationship with Tony. He might not want him to stand in for his father anymore, but he still didn’t like the idea of him just disappearing from his life because it turned out he _did_ have a son of his own.

He had to forcibly remind himself that Tony had told him about Peter for the first time months ago, and nothing had changed in that time when he visited the Keeners. He had still called, he had still sent him cool stuff so that he could keep building stuff, even though he didn’t invent anything as life changing and world-altering as Peter did. 

In the end he finally fell asleep over the thought that he could do nothing about it either way, at least not until Tony arrived. 

* * *

Two day later, a car way too fancy for this area parked in front of the Kenner house and Tony Stark got out. Like most of the time when he visited Rose Hill, he had left Happy at home. Out here, he didn’t need him and he didn’t want to force more people on Mary Keener’s hospitality then was strictly necessary. 

Because he hadn’t got nearly as good timing as he believed, everyone was still sitting at the breakfast table when he knocked on the door. It was Robert that opened the door and invited him in rather than one of the kids.

When Robert came back into the kitchen with Tony in tow, the billionaire immediately had the attention of the entire room. 

Under the tumult that was five people greeting a newcomer all at the same time, he walked around the table, squeezing first Harley’s then Peter’s shoulder. When he sat down, May leaned over from the chair next to him and kissed him on the cheek - and when that was a thing he would ever grow accustomed to, he would eat his particle accelerator.

When Mary got up to get him a plate, he gestured for her to sit back down. She did, but Robert made a beeline to the cabinets instead. Tony rolled his eyes, but immediately took one of the pancakes from the middle of the table. 

“So, how did everything go?” May asked as soon as he had something to eat in front of him. She still sounded a little worried.

“Everything's fine. We finally found Ross, caught him red-handed actually, as he was trying to get Toomes moved to another facility. He’s back in prison, but the attorney general has offered him a drastically reduced sentence for keeping his mouth shut about the whole affair. Your friend Liz will be happy about that.” He nodded at Peter.

Harley startled a little at the mention of Secretary Ross and the attorney general. He never forgot that Tony was rich, but it was hard to remember exactly how rich and how powerful he was when Harley mostly saw him wearing grease stained clothes, working in his shop. 

“What about Ross? What did he even want from you?”

Tony threw a quick glance over to Peter as if to gauge how much the guy had let slip, before turning around to answer Harley. 

“What didn’t he want? Guy’s a slimebag. He’s been angling to get me either removed from every important discourse or into his corner for ages. It’s not the first time he’s used- unsavory methods either. First time we could pin him on it, though. There’ll finally be a proper investigation into his time in DC and after that it’s not likely he’ll ever see daylight again.” Tony took a heartfelt bite of the pancake and Harley wondered why Tony was surprised how bad Peter was at keeping secrets. He clearly had it from Tony. There was no way he was supposed to tell them all that.

“So basically everything went according to plan?” asked Peter

“Yeah, which reminds me.” Tony put down the cutlery to fish something from his jacket. Out came a white envelope that he tossed over to Peter.

“What is it?” Peter made no move to open the envelope.

“Open it, then you’ll know.”

Peter hesitantly opened the envelope and pulled out a few papers. It was silent around the table as everyone waited for Peter to read out what it said. Tony was already grinning widely when he looked up with eyes bigger than Harley had thought humanly possible. 

“Really?” he sounded almost as excited as he looked. 

“Told you it was a no-brainer. Congratulations, kiddo.” He ruffled Peter’s hair as May jumped up from her seat. 

“The patent‘s come through?” She took the papers out of his hands to read them herself. When she was only twenty seconds in, she dropped them on the table, where they only narrowly avoided Peter’s syrupy plate, and threw her arms around her nephew. 

“Congratulations, honey, your first patent. I’m so proud of you!”

“That’s impressive Peter, congratulations!” Mary toasted him with her coffee mug. “What is it for?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, really. I invented a new fabric, it’s not a big deal.” 

“The kid’s being modest. He invented a super light and ultra thin ballistic fabric that can be used to make clothes that are completely bulletproof. Only way you’ll get a serious injury while wearing it is if you’re shot from close range and the pure impact of the bullet breaks a rib or something; the bullet won't go through, though. I’m already negotiating with Shield; they want to make sure they’ll get the first batch for their Agents.”

Harley suddenly lost his appetite, as his mum got a couple of bottles of non-alcoholic champagne from Tony's bag and an impromptu party broke out around Peter, who quickly grew as red as a tomato.

* * *

After breakfast the next day, Harley was finally able to get away. Since Tony had arrived, all he had wanted was some time for himself. He needed to think and the more he didn't get that time, the more he grew restless and irritable.

When they had finished eating and everyone was cleaning up, he had managed to slip out without anyone noticing. He wanted to go to the workshop, but he knew that anyone noticing his absence would go looking there first, so instead, he went into the garden. There was an old Hollywood swing there that Robert had brought with him when he had moved in. 

Once the quiet had settled around him, he let the last week pass through his head. He tried to remember every little thing he and Peter had gone over in the workshop and there was so much - they had, after all, spent almost all their time there. 

He had been impressed with how fast Peter had taken to the computer system once he had explained everything. Enough so that he had wondered if Tony had ever even tried to teach him. Based on his impression of their relationship, he was pretty sure that Peter hadn’t asked and Tony had probably forgotten. He did that sometimes when he was working on a problem. Or maybe they just hadn’t had the need yet. Peter _had_ mentioned that Tony had just now taken interest in how good a programmer he was.

Then there was literally everything else. They had worked on a lot of different projects together, which had been insanely fun, mostly because he finally didn’t have to hold back. He and Robert sometimes worked on a few cars, but this, _this_ was something else entirely. He’d had no idea that working with someone who matched his intelligence would be so fun. Suddenly, he could wait even less to get to MIT. The idea to work with people like this all the time. It was insane.

And Peter was just brilliant. When they had worked together, they had been speeding through problems and ideas at a pace that was intoxicating, but a few times they had split to work on their own stuff and just- Peter had requested paper and pen instead of working with a computer and though Harley had snarked endlessly about the old-fanionedness of it, he had obliged. 

He had started slowly, writing and scratching out again, but half an hour in he had been writing like he was possessed. The speed with which the pen had left chemical formulas and notes on the paper had been dizzying and even after sitting next to Peter for ten minutes and staring at it, he hadn’t been able to figure out what he had been working on. 

Now, biochemistry (or any form of chemistry, really) wasn't his strong suit and Peter had been happy to explain. He still hadn’t understood the formulas after he had known their purpose was - which had been unsettling. He had only ever had to ask a question twice when he was with Tony. 

And that was another thing. Peter had been inventing new chemistry stuff without a lab to test it in, being the fucking mozart of science and he couldn’t even figure out if Peter was Tony’s son or not. Sure, there was all the evidence he had come up with last night, except since he arrived Peter had stubbornly only ever called him Mr Stark and Tony in turn mostly just called him Parker. 

The swing moved when someone sat down next to him, but he wasn't finished thinking yet, so he didn't look up. He knew who it was anyway. 

All their interactions were different than he would have expected from a father and son, but it actually fit quite well with the awkwardness of meeting your father when you were already a teenager. He himself hadn’t been quite sure how to make the transition from Mister Dent to Robert after he had dropped the hostility

But then, that wasn’t really what he was out here to think about, was it? Rather it was that paper that Tony had brought with him, along with a frame so it would be ready to be photographed with. 

At last, he just blurted it out. “Is he smarter than me?” 

God, why did he have to be like this? He wanted to take the words back immediately but instead he kept on rambling. 

“It’s just, he already has this patent, right? And I know that despite everything you give me here, it’s nothing against your shop in New York, but then he works out these insane formulas on paper and they just don’t make any damn sense to me. And that is after he explained them to me. And that is just- You know? And then he isn’t just smarter than me, is he? Because he’s got all these brains and he is using it to design bullet proof fabric to save lives and what do I do with my brains? Build things that blow up, and cars, and funny bots, and programm computers. And then-” but he finally managed to bite his tongue before he could make this any worse. If there was a way to make this worse.

God, he wanted to kick himself, because he was being stupid. He knew that he was unsettlingly smart, too, all his teachers told him so. Regularly. And it wasn’t like Tony was just going to tell him, ‘Yes, he’s smarter than you’.

“Yes, he’s smarter than you.” Well, so much for that theory. “ But I’ll tell you what. It isn't hard. “

“Wow, Tony. Great. Thanks for that. “ He made to get up, but Tony’s hand landed on his neck, gently pushing him back down. 

“It’s not because you're not insanely intelligent, you idiot. It’s because he’s Peter. He’s smarter than me, too.”

That, finally, made him look up. The man's face was full of honest pride, which landed him firmly in the ‘definitively Peter's dad’ category. He also definitely meant it. Harley still had to ask. 

“Really? Smarter than Tony Stark?”

“Yep.” Tony was outright grinning now. “But don’t tell him that. I haven’t yet either, I'm a little afraid he’s going to faint.”

That made Harley grin, because after the way Peter’s fingers had been shaking when he accepted the patent from his dad, he could totally see that happen. But that also brought him round to the second part of his rambling and he bit his lip. He didn't want to ask, he also didn’t need to. He'd spent the last couple of weeks with the other teenager, and he knew that he was a genuinely good person. Definitely a better person than Harley. 

Tony’s hand squeezed his neck for a second. “Now, about that second part.” He was silent for a few seconds and if he were anyone but Tony, Harley would have already begun fidgeting. 

“I’m a superhero, but I'm by no means a very good person.” Halrey opened his mouth to protest, but he wanted to hear what came next and he knew if he started with this now, he and Tony would be arguing the point over the next half hour. It had happened before. So, just this once, he let it go.

“I've met loads of really good people, though. Doctors, nurses, firefighters. Sometimes civilians who will start helping as many people as they can when everyone else is running for their lives. Even an odd journalist or two. But Peter. He's still the best person that I know. Most of what he does is for other people, often enough people he doesn’t even know, certainly often enough people who don't deserve it. Hell, this whole world doesn’t deserve him.” He took a deep breath. 

“But that doesn’t mean that you're a bad person kiddo. You're allowed to enjoy your childhood. I never got to do these fun things with science. Not until I met Rhodey, at least, and I'm really glad that you _do_. You have more than enough time to help people. I have no doubt that you’ll bring us all a big step forward, but you don't have to do all this now, okay? And you don’t ever have to stop enjoying the fun part of science. Once you do that, it starts being work. Okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

They sat in silence for a while as he was processing all that. There wasn’t really anything he could argue with, since he had met Peter and he didn’t want science to stop making fun, so he decided to just trust Tony on this. And with that decision, something inside of him that had been stressing him out since that one phone call eased again.

“Yeah, okay,” he repeated, “I’m fine now. We should better go back inside, I bet Robert has already set up Monopoly and I want to get there before your kid buys all the good streets. He might be the best person there is, but he's ruthless with the monopoly money.”

He stood and was already halfway to the door when he heard Tony splutter behind him. 

“What do you mean ‘my kid’? Why do people always assume that he's mine?”

Harley just threw a grin over his shoulder and jogged into the house. When he entered the kitchen, Peter was already getting his first rent paid from May. _Damn it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Here](https://www.pinterest.de/pin/770678554964543252/) is a picture comparing Tom Holland to young RDJ, if you're interessted


	4. Betty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Betty isn't really close with Peter, but she still considers him her friend. So when he breaks down in physics class, of course she volenteers to bring him to the nurse. What happens then is ...not something she would ever have guessed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently, when the words don't fight me every step of the way, I can write chapters in one week (+ one week and a day because I can already tell the next one is gonna resist a bit more again and I wanted a little bit of a buffer - plus I kinda wanted to post on my Birthday :D ) Enjoy :)

To Betty it seemed as if she had always known Peter. They weren’t really close and had never been, but they had been in the same orbit since Peter had gotten a scholarship to the Midtown Middle School for exceptional Children. Betty had always thought that her parents paid at least half of the horrendous feas for that ridiculous name. She had been in advanced schools since Kindergarten, but Peter had been in normal schools until his second year of Middle School. She couldn’t fathom how bored he must have been, especially considering that Peter was the most intelligent person she had ever met. No matter what kind of rumors Flash spread around the school, Betty was always conscious of the fact that even at this level of Stem school, Peter was probably bored to death. 

Knowing him for years, she was always certain that there were probably only a handful of people that deserved Peter’s life less than he himself. Peter was a wonderful guy. He was always polite and helpful. She had never seen him turn someone down who had seriously asked for help. And despite the fact that if anyone in this school had the right to be arrogant about their intelligence it was Peter, he had never been arrogant a day in his life. 

That all made her hurt for him even more when his uncle had died. She wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but least of all on Peter, who had so little to begin with, having already lost his parents before he had any chance of knowing them and could only afford the schools they had attended together because he kept his straight A’s. 

Maybe that was why she was so irked that Flash just would. not. shut. up. It was mild in the beginning, just little comments about their grades. How Pete was only getting better grades because he was sucking up to the teachers. And she had been new to decathlon, then, so she hadn’t said anything out of fear to make herself unwelcome in the team. Today she regretted it, but she also knew that she couldn’t change it now. Instead she did her best to make sure that he knew that she was on his side. 

And then came the internship.

She hadn’t been exactly sure what she should think about it when Flash came bursting into the classroom one day, hysterical with laughter, practically wheezing as he told everyone that Peter was trying to make people believe that he had an internship at Stark Industries. With anyone else, her first reaction would have been a categorical refusal to believe that that was true.

Although with Peter that was a different matter. For one, Peter hadn’t been the one to actually tell  _ anyone  _ about the internship. If Betty had to guess, Flash had probably heard Peter and Ned talk and had gleefully run with whatever he had overheard. 

Which left a couple of possibilities. Either, they had been fantasizing about how cool such an internship would actually be, and Flash had thought they were talking about actually having one. With the level of nerdiness going on between them, that might just be the most likely explanation for the whole drama.

Stark Industries did not give out internships to High School students. Everyone knew that, at least at Midtown; enough of it’s students had tried to apply anyway. 

So, there was no internship anyone could have and Peter hadn’t told anyone that he had one. Still. This was Peter. 

Betty sat next to him in physics. Sometimes she caught glimpses of the formulas he was doodling when he pretended to listen to the teacher. If anyone scored an internship with SI way younger than was normal, it was the kid that was doing physics beyond even what college students did - in High School. 

So she had just asked Peter. Not if he had the internship, because that would decidedly not have sounded like she was in his corner. No, she had asked him what it was like at SI. The way his eyes had lit up had burned away even the littlest doubt about the whole thing. He had spent the next minutes gushing about the advanced labs he got to work in and the brilliant people he had met. He talked way through Mr Harrison trying to start the decathlon training, which was enough excitement to tire out a whole litter of puppies. 

In the end, she was pretty sure that she, Ned and MJ were the only people who believed Peter about the internship. She couldn’t really blame the rest of their year, hell, the rest of the school. It was rather improbable, but so was Peter.

It was weeks and months later, when everything suddenly collapsed around them all. A hurricane or truths, lies, and rumors with the school in the center of it all and it began with Peter collapsing in physics. 

It was the only class she shared with Peter that didn't also have Ned or Mj in it. She wasn’t sure, in this instance, if that was a good thing. When she had sat down next to him half an hour ago, he had already looked pale as death, half lying on the desk. She had asked him if he was ok, but as soon as the first word was out of her mouth, Peter had jumped so terribly, she had to hold back a flinch of her own. He had explained, in a voice so low she had to lean down to him until she was only inches away from him, that he had a terrible headache and that he got sensitive to sound when this happened. 

She had wanted him to go to the nurse, but he hadn’t wanted to. 

“He’ll not be able to do much about it. I have to wait it out. Plus, he’ll want to call May and she can’t afford to get called away from work at the moment. I’ll be fine.”

Betty still would have liked to get him to the nurse, but she had respected his decision. She didn’t want to be the reason May got in trouble, not when Peter said he would be fine. It had been a mistake, she knew that when she saw him sway on his chair and then collapse to the floor so fast she hadn’t even had time to reach for him.

After a display like that, there was no need to call the attention of the teacher. All eyes were already on Peter’s crumpled form, lying on the floor. By the time she was kneeling next to him, he was already trying to sit up again. Dr Blake was there before he got far. 

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. He was really pale earlier. He said he had a bad headache, but he didn’t want to go to the nurse. He said he would be fine in a few minutes.” Betty was still a little shook. It helped little that Peter was now trying to pull himself back into his chair. 

“I’m fine. Honestly. I just didn't sleep much.,” he mumbled, but it was barely audible. 

“You can tell this all Nurse Johnson, Peter. You’re not staying here, you need a quiet place to rest at the very least!” the woman looked up to Betty, who was quick to speak over Peter’s weak assurances that he was fine.

“I’ll take him.”

“Good. Take both your things. Stay with him until he gets better.”

She went to the front and got two hall passes while Betty packed both of their things into the bags. 

Luckily, it wasn't far to the nurse’s office, but they still took ages, with Betty carrying both of their bags and Peter leaning onto her. He didn’t put much weight on her, but enough to worry her. By the time they made it to the right door, she was a little out of breath and Peter was pretty out of it. 

When they stumbled through the door, nurse Johnson looked up from his book a little startled, but to his credit he was up and taking over Peter’s weight from her only a few seconds later. 

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. He said he had a headache, that he would be fine in a moment, then he just broke down.”

Johnson helped the boy over to the stretcher and Peter tumbled on it with a barely concealed groan. 

“Are you staying or do you need to go back to class?” Johnson asked her while his attention was focused on shining a light into Peter’s eyes, which made him moan and twitch away from the little flashlight. Betty was crossing the room and from a nervous feeling to frightened quickly. She sat down next to Peter, out of the way of Nurse Johnson. “I’ll stay.”

She wanted to take Peter’s hand, or squeeze his shoulder, but she was afraid to hurt him. 

The nurse felt his pulse and even from that he flinched away. 

He cursed. “Does this happen often?”

When Peter made no move to answer, Betty said, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen him like this, but he doesn’t exactly share stuff like this. He had asthma, but it has gotten better over the last year or so. He barely even has to use his inhaler.”

“This is nothing to do with asthma. I need to call his parents.”

Betty grimaced. “He said on the way over here that his aunt can’t take any calls. She’s at work and he was adamant that she won't answer.”

“Yeah, well, someone has to come and get him.”

“Isn’t there a second number?” She was sure that Peter had mentioned that May had had trouble getting the school to admit the second contact for some reason. Maybe because whoever it was wasn’t family or something like that.

Nurse Johnson snorted. “Yeah, but that’s not gonna work. I don’t know how they even got that in there.”

Betty bristled at that. It was grating to hear everyone assume Peter was a liar, she had no idea how he managed not to start a screaming match every few weeks. “I won’t exactly hurt to call the number, no matter what name is on it, will it?” She must have sounded colder than she thought, because he threw her a look somewhere between surprised and annoyed, but he reached for the phone. Only when he was already waiting for an answer did she wonder what kind of name would make someone immediately assume that there would be no answer.

Of course then there was an answer,  _ because Peter was not a liar! _

That alone seemed to baffle Nurse Johnson so much that he could barely string a sentence together. Betty didn’t listen further. Satisfied with the knowledge that someone was on their way, she turned her attention back to Peter. He was still just lying there, drawn together to a small ball and shivering terribly. She was desperate for something to do, but she didn’t dare touch him. She had just barely overheard the words sensory overload from Johnson when he had been on the phone. Instead, she reached over Peter’s prone form and let the blinds of the window right over him fall down. When he sighed with something similar to relieve, she got up and let down the blinds on the other window as well.

They didn’t have to wait long, but to Betty it felt like an eternity. Only minutes before the bell was going to ring, she heard hurried footsteps on the floor. Finally. 

The door opened so fast it almost hit the wall, before a hand shot out and caught it just in time. Then Tony Stark was kneeling next to the stretcher. 

“Pete?” he reached out his hand and, careful as anything, swept his hair out of his face. 

“‘ony?” Peter sounded wrecked and Betty’s insides cramped together. 

“Shh, it’s alright, Pete. What happened?” So Bety explained the whole thing a third time. Stark never looked away from Peter while he listened. “Can you sit up?” Peter whined at that, but he did do his best to sit up. Tony helped him up, pushing with careful, soft hands until the boy was upright. 

“It’s okay, you’re gonna be okay. Here, drink this kid, it’s gonna get better soon.” Out of nowhere he pulled a little bottle that he held to Peter’s lips until he drank.

“Hey, one moment, what are you giving him?” Suddenly nurse Johnson seemed to have remembered that he was supposed to be the one to be taking care of the student. 

“It’s just a pain medication. He has this regularly, pills will aggravate him too much. This’ll work faster and soothe his throat.”

They waited for a moment and then another and another. Finally, after a few long minutes, Peter seemed to just sag into himself as if his strings had been cut. Stark sighed in relief. 

“Alright, he’ll be asleep in a moment, then I’m taking him.” Indeed Peter had already begun sinking deeper and deeper into himself and down the stretcher again.

“Will he be alright?” Betty couldn’t help asking. Even though he was no longer whimpering in pain, Peter was still deadly pale and his breathing still seemed a little laboured.

“He’ll be fine. He just needs peace and quiet. And sleep. But he’ll be fine.” The man smiled down at the teenager that was not lying on the floor yet only because his head had sunk to Stark’s chest and he had wrapped his hands securely around him.

Another 40 seconds had gone by in silence before Stark moved again. He carefully slid his arms under Peter’s knees and shoulders and easily lifted the boy up. “You know either I’m getting too old for this or you’re getting too heavy, Underoos.” He had said it so quietly that Betty had almost missed it. He had already reached the door when Betty finally shot up and hurried after him. Nurse Johnson still seemed in shock and didn't say a word to either of them. 

“Hey, wait a second! I need to talk with you.” Stark, already in the hall, turned around and raised an eyebrow before pointedly looking at the teenager in his arms. “I’ll walk with you,'' Betty amended. Stark looked a little incredulous, but he didn’t protest. 

“You’re Tony Stark.” She bit her lip. That had been a stupid statement.  _ Obviously  _ he was Tony Stark. It was just that the fact had just now started to really register. But there would be time for a proper reaction later. 

“Listen, if you’re after something, you’re gonna have to tell me what it is and I gotta tell you, I rather infamously don’t react well to any kinds of threats or blackmail, so you should really think about what is going to come out of your mouth next.” Betty blinked. That was -huh?

“What?”

“You have rather cleverly seduced that I’m Tony Stark. You have found a weak point of mine, not many people manage that; so, congratulations, you get one free wish. But you better be careful, because this is a very limited kind of deal. One wish  _ means  _ one wish. If you try to press more out of me I’ll call-” Okay, this was getting ridiculous. 

“I don't want anything from you!” Stark glanced at her for a moment. Then his face softened.

“Oh. Right, you’re one of us.” He nodded as if that made any kind of sense. “Sorry, then. What's up?”

“I’m one of who now?”

“One of the people the kid has wrapped around his finger. He’s good at that, I was just under the impression that there weren’t too many here.” With a nod he indicated the school. 

For a moment, Betty didn’t know what to do with that. Then she shoved it to the back of her mind to think about later, like the fact that she was having the weirdest conversation of all time with  _ Tony Stark _ right now. 

“Right. While we’re on the topic. Obviously you care about him, so I thought you should know that he’s having a hard time right now.”

“Yeah, I know, but he won’t let me do anything about it, and I sure as hell won’t tell him to pretend to be less intelligent than he is just to appease that little menace.”

“Not what I’m talking about. Though that is probably part of the problem. But a big part is that no one believes him that he has that internship with you.”

Stark stopped like he had run into a wall. 

“So I think he didn’t tell you about that. Listen, I don’t know what to think about that either, because telling everyone that you have an SI internship at the one school that collectively knows that SI doesn’t give internships to High Schoolers is just stupid. But I also know that Peter isn’t a liar. Plus, you know, the fact that you’re standing here right now.” She held open the door so that he could move out of the building.

“So you’re asking me what, exactly?” They had reached a sleek, expensive sports car. Following Stark's nod, she opened the passenger door. She waited until he had slowly put Peter into the seat. He stirred for a moment, opened his eyes and squeezed them shut again immediately. Stark brushed his hair out of his face again and Peter settled into the seat. Stark quietly shut the door and turned back to Betty.

“I don’t know what to do about this either. Normally I would say just show up and tell everyone that you know him but that,” she gestured in the direction of Peter and the car and all that he had just done, “That doesn’t exactly scream intern. And I know that Peter wants the others to shut up about this whole thing, but he probably wants them to talk about  _ this  _ even less.”

For a moment they just stared at each other, the gifted child and the genius billionaire. 

“Alright.”

“Alright?”

“Yeah. I’ll think of something.” Without another word he got into the car and then he was gone. 

For a moment Betty stood there and wondered if this had all just been a weird ass dream. Then she almost doubled over with the shock that suddenly, finally raced through her system.

She kept standing there, staring at the air where just a minute agoa car worth more than her parent's house had parked. 

Then the weirdness of this all hit. What the  _ hell _ ? She had known that Peter had to have some kind of affiliation with SI otherwise none of his behaviour would have made even the slightest sense. But this?  _ THis _ ?This was on a whole other fucking level. Stark was behaving like a - like a  _ dad _ . Betty froze. 

No. No way. Her thoughts were racing like they only did during decathlon finals or when she was trying the most interesting physics questions.

There was no way. Only how would she know? She might have been too young to have been interested in tabloids when Stark had been partying his way around the world, but that didn't mean that she didn’t know about that. By the time she had met Peter, his Parents had been long dead and he never talked about them. Was it really so hard to believe that maybe it had been his stepfather that had died? Maybe Peter hadn’t even known.

Oh god, suddenly this all made perfect sense. Of course SI didn’t give out internships to High Schoolers. But it was a nice enough cover for why a teenager would be coming and going in Stark Tower, right? It would be - well not perfectly good, but at least a mildly reasonable explanation for how Tony Stark knew a teenager from Midtown. In case they ever got caught hanging out together. 

She fumbled for her phone, only to realise that it was still in her bag in the nurse's office, next to Peter’s bag. She had some googling to do, there had to be some indicator if that was actually a possibility. She kind of hoped it was. If anyone deserved a little more family and luck in the world, it was Peter. She turned around to go and collect their bags and stopped. 

Behind her on the steps to the main entrance to the school stood Flash. He, too, was staring after that stupidly loud-looking sports car. Shit.

She made her way over. Before she could get a word out, Flash rounded on her.

“Was that Tony Stark? With PARKER?”

“And what if they were?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It can’t have been Stark!” But he sounded very unsure.

“Listen to me, Flash, you’ll keep your mouth shut about this, you hear me? You created enough problems. I mean it!” Flash kept staring into the air and she sighed. There was nothing she could do here except warn Peter. She resolved herself to shoot him a text as soon as she had her phone again and to a long night of googling and social media stalking Tony Stark. Jesus, this was too weird. 

The next morning Peter was back already, which was a little bit of a relief. It couldn’t have been as bad as it had looked yesterday if he was already back in school. She didn’t get a chance to talk to him before lunch, so she was waiting for him in front of the cafeteria. 

Just as he was walking up next to her, there was a tumult down the hall and they both turned around.

This had to be a joke. Some kind of cosmic joke. Because there was Tony Stark again. Walking down the halls of Midtown High. It took him reaching the spot where the two of them were standing, staring at him incredulously for Betty to notice that principal Morita was walking with him. 

“Mr Stark?” Peter sounded actually surprised. Which was probably a good indicator that whatever Stark was trying to do here, he had not warned Peter about it. Stark stopped next to them and looked for a moment, then he snapped with his fingers as if he had just remembered something.

“I’ve seen you before. In the labs at SI. Parker, right?” Peter just kept staring at him, so Betty elbowed him as discreetly as possible.

“Ehm, yes. Yes, sir, that’s me.”

“Good work last week, with the thingy from the Doc.”

“Ehm.” Peter looked around like he couldn't understand what the hell was going on here. “Thank you? What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I’m just discussing with your principal the possibility of SI donating to the school. If they bring out such brilliant scientists then we should make sure that more people can attend, don’t you think?”

Like Peter, Betty stared at the billionaire. Inside her head, she laughed almost hysterically. Of course the guy who thought it was a good idea to use an impossible internship as a plausible explanation to hang out with his son would use said internship as a cover to boost up the image of said son. God, it was a miracle that they hadn’t been found out yet. Though, to his credit, she had found nothing online that had actually indicated that they were father and son. She had found nothing that said the contrary either, though.

Stark had been inside the building for no longer than half an hour, but for the rest of the week no one would talk about anything else. 

At least she had managed to take Peter aside in the chaos following that stunt. 

“He. Ehm. He really isn’t my dad.” Peter had insisted, when she had told him that Flash might have drawn the same conclusion as she did. 

“Whatever he is, Flash might be onto you. For real this time. Or at the very least he is concocting his next conspiracy theory.” She just barely stopped herself from recommending him to get better at lying. With how red he had gotten in a matter of seconds and how he stuttered his way through that one sentence, it made it hard to think he actually believed that himself. Instead, she had just left it at that.

The next week she saw Flash talking to a man just outside of school. She didn’t think anything of it and she wouldn’t until much, much later, when it was already way too late. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> P.S. With this chapter we reached over 15,000 words! Wuhu!


	5. Pepper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pepper knew that something could happen to her at all times. She just hadn't expected it to be something as mundane as a car crash. That is, before she lost most of her memories in one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, like the last time I made you guys wait for ages for the new chapter, it's at least a long one. A really long one. Enjoy :)

Pepper had been conscious of the fact that something could happen to her for years now. Not necessarily in a bad way, it wasn’t like she was thinking about it constantly. But every now and then she couldn’t help but think that this might be her last conversation with someone or her last time eating at a certain restaurant. Things like that, and she shifted her behaviour accordingly. It wasn't actually a bad way to live your life. 

It was just that she had always thought that if or when something happened to her, it would be either because of SI or because of Iron Man. It would certainly not be the first time that something with Si had put someone in danger. She couldn’t even count the death threats Tony had gotten during his time as CEO and hers were getting up there, too. Most of them were harmless, just people venting, no matter how terrifying that could be. There were people who actually tried to follow through, though. Not so much with the death threats, but there had been enough stones thrown at their employees and buildings that they were more than justified in the extensive security systems and the many, many guards that came with that.

And then, with Tony. Well. She had been very aware how much danger surrounded that whole Avengers gig. Sometimes she thought she had known even before Tony had. There was always a chance that someone wanted to let out their anger on her for much the same reasons as with SI. Because she was connected to him and the company and for some people that was enough to project any and all of their misfortunes onto her. 

She loved Tony both despite and because he did it all anyway. And SI. She knew that the work they did with the company was important. Much like Tony wouldn’t stop being Iron Man, she couldn’t think of one thing that would scare her out of the position of being able to affect actual change. 

When she saw the other car racing right toward theirs, she thought of all that and had just enough time to be surprised. This wasn’t what she imagined would happen, but then when had their life ever turned out like she thought it would. She just really hoped she would survive this. She might live her life like every day could be her last, but she still wanted more time.

Then the world went black.

* * *

When Ginny woke up, the sunlight hurt even through her closed eyelids. Her mouth was dry, but she couldn’t remember going to a party last night. Or anytime in the last months since she had quit at MIA and started working at SI.

She opened her eyes. Huh. That wasn’t her room. It almost looked like a fancy hotel room, if not for the machines beeping next to her bed. A hospital? Yeah, definitively, she could see the call button. It was too far to reach for, though. Her arms were too heavy. So, she just stared at the ceiling and let herself come to, slowly.

It took a while until a door opened and a nurse walked in. She bustled in, only looking up when she was already halfway into the room. Then she stopped and stared for a second, before a brilliant smile lit up her face.

“Ms. Potts! It’s good to see you’re awake again. Let me just call the doctor.”

Before Ginny could wet her throat enough to be able to speak, the woman was already gone again.

The doctor took just long enough for her to get nervous.

Finally, an older woman in a white coat came through the door, still peering down on the chart she was holding. She looked up at exactly the same time as she came to stand in front of the bed.

“Ms. Potts!” she smiled warmly. “I’m glad to see you awake, and I’m sure a lot of people will be happy to hear the good news.”

Ginny doubted that. She didn’t have family to speak of - certainly none that she had talked to since moving out of her parent’s house. She didn’t have friends to speak of, either. Really, the only one she could think of who would actually care was her roommate and only close friend. But Bailey had just scored a good job at an advertising agency, there was no way she would be coming over in the middle of the day. She would probably bring by a few things in the evening.

“We’ll need to do a few tests. Your condition was vastly improving the last few days, but now that you’re awake, we should check how you are doing more thoroughly.”

Ginny nodded and finally managed to get the words out. “How long was I-'' then she didn’t quite have the guts to finish the question. 

“Oh, not too long. Almost a week, now.”

Ginny shuddered at the thought. She didn’t know in what world almost a week of unconsciousness was considered not a long time. 

“First things first, are you in any pain?”

Ginny thought about it for a moment, carefully taking inventory. “My head,” she croaked. “And my neck is really stiff.” The doctor nodded.

“That is to be expected after a car accident like that. To be honest, you are lucky it isn’t worse.” The doc came around the bed so that she was standing right next to Ginny, reaching out her hands. “May I?” Ginny nodded.

The doc felt carefully at the back of her neck and then over her head. “Does this hurt?” she asked sometimes, but Ginny always shook her head. 

“Alright. Right now, everything seems fine, but we’ll make an MRI anyway.” Ginny really didn’t like the sound of that, but not enough to actually reject the test. That was definitely on the plus side of actually having a real job right after college and not having to work an unpaid internship. 

“Can you tell me what the last thing you remember is?” 

For a terrifying moment she had to think really hard about it. Then, she remembered.

“There was a car coming right at me.” The doc nodded. Ginny frowned. “I could have sworn that I avoided the crash. It was a pretty close call, but we missed each other. I would swear that I held at the corner because I was so shaken. Did someone drive into my car while I was parking?” She looked up, but the doc didn’t answer her. 

In fact, the woman had stilled completely. 

“You avoided the crash? I was told your chauffeur was driving when the crash happened.” Ginny snorted at the idea of having a chauffeur. The doc withdrew her hands and grabbed the chart again. 

“Ms. Potts, can you tell me what day it is?”

_Well, shit._

* * *

Ginny was still a little nauseated after her talk with Dr. Kusnezow. She had gotten the appointment for the MRI in astonishing speed, but maybe that shouldn’t really surprise her, considering-

She still could not believe that she had forgotten _fifteen_ years of her life. And she had been worried that she had been unconscious for a week! She still could not fathom it. When she had started at Stark Industries, she had had a ten-year plan. And now she had jumped ahead to way beyond that, unable to remember even the slightest thing. Not a single memory from all those years. 

As soon as she had been able to shake the shock she had jumped out of the bed and practically ran to the bathroom. She had desperately wanted a look in the mirror and perhaps that had been vain, but just yesterday, she had been in her twenties, and now she was- not anymore. Just skipped over what everyone collectively thought should have been the best years of her life.

She had studiously ignored the Louis Vuitton bag sitting on the counter.

She didn’t look bad, actually. Older, sure, but there were no wrinkles, barely any shadows under her eyes. Then again, that also wasn’t surprising if it was true what they had told her. Her mother had always had the theory that rich people tended to age slower. Seemed like she hadn’t been too wrong about that. God, it was weird to think about herself as rich when the last thing she remembered was being in crushing debt, like every other college student ever. 

As if summoned by her thoughts, there was a knock on the door just a minute after she had gotten out of the bathroom. She knew who it was, because he had called and asked if it would be okay if he came by. Which was- quite something. It still took her a fucking long moment to answer. It was just too weird to think that who stood outside her room actually stood there, and she honestly couldn’t say if she was more worried that he was actually there or that he was not.

It took her at least 35 seconds until she cleared her throat and finally called him in. And then the door opened, and Tony Stark walked in like it was the most natural thing in the world for him to be in her hospital room. (Which perhaps it was, considering he was supposedly her fiancé. Jesus Christ.)

He looked nothing at all like the man she knew from the tabloids. Sure, he was definitely the same man, but he had aged. Not quite as well as her, though he was still damn good looking. Or he could have been, if not for the fact that his eyes were red, and he had dark shadows under his eyes. He had been crying. That surprised her. She didn’t know why.

Stark’s eyes flickered to the bed before finding her at the table by the window. Even though he was dressed casually in the tee of a band even she remembered, she was glad that she had dressed in the one of the nicer outfits she had found in the closet. Not that there had been anything in there that had not been nice. Just like her room, that looked more like it would be found in a hotel rather than a hospital. She had the suspicion that none of the clothes could be bought for two figure prices. It was disturbing to think about. 

“Hi.” God, he even sounded rough. “Can I-” he gestured to the empty seat in front of her. She nodded. 

For a moment they just stared at each other. Ginny’s eyes dropped to the bag he had dumped on the floor when he had sat down. “Oh. I brought you a few things. More comfortable clothes, mostly. Some books.“ That was actually really nice. Considerate. Not a word she had thought she would ever use in the context of her boss, but then ‘fiancé’ wasn’t either.

“Thank you.” She desperately tried to think of something to say, but there was only emptiness.

“How are you feeling?” That was- a complicated question.

“Didn’t the Doctors tell you?” Were they even allowed to tell him? Part of her hoped not, because as far as she was concerned, this was her boss, and he really didn’t have the right. But another part of her hoped that he already knew what there was to know, because this was also the man she had intended to marry and he deserved answers, she just didn’t know if she could give them.

“About your medical conditions, yes.” He looked as if he wasn’t sure whether to look at her or not. “Is that okay?” Ginny was surprised, again. He was so- human. Not the half-god party-boy the media liked to paint him as.

‘Of course, he is human’ she thought a little ashamed. She should be more sensible than believing everything the rainbow press of all things liked to write about him. She nodded.

“But I meant, how are you doing with the memory loss thing. It must be-“ He didn’t finish the sentence, but she could understand that. She also didn’t know how to describe what she was feeling right then.

“Yeah, pretty much. I- how are you doing?”

Stark laughed and, to her absolute horror, it sounded a little wet, a little chocked.

“I’m glad your still alive. Less glad that you forgot all memory that made you somehow fall in love with me.” They both winced at that. “Sorry, not what I meant to say. This really isn’t your fault, it’s just that-“ He took a deep breath and hid his face in his hands. “I’m sorry.”

She looked at him. He looked absolutely broken, slumped in as he was, trying to hide from her as if he expected her to judge him for it.

Just like that, she had tears in her eyes. For both of them, for what they had lost with this accident. She would have liked to remember being loved like that. She would have liked to remember loving this man, too. Everything she knew about him, and with what she was seeing right now, he seemed to be an extraordinary person. Certainly not someone who deserved this.

She wiped the tears that had spilled over and reached over the desk to put her hand on his arm. “Hey, it’s okay. This is hard for both of us, right? We shouldn’t loose hope just yet. You like numbers, right? The doctors said I have a 70 percent chance to get my memories back and 50 percent that all of them come back.” She wondered how she had ended up comforting him. But somehow, she hadn’t been able to just watch him crumble. She wondered, for a moment, if maybe her body remembered being in love with him in a way that she didn’t.

“Shit, I’m sorry. You’re right. I should be the one making you feel better. I promised myself I wouldn’t. I’m sorry.”

Ginny kept silent while Tony calmed down a little. When he looked up, he gave her a blinding smile.

“Would you like dinner? I know that even as a private patient, the food really isn’t that good.”

“That sounds good, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to leave, though.”

“That’s no problem, I’ll let it come here.” He froze. “Unless that was a polite way to decline. I have to be honest, that doesn’t work with me. I always miss things like that and if you present me with a problem, I hyper focus on solving it, so, please be blunt?” That was – almost cute.

“No, I really don’t know if I can leave the hospital. I’ll keep that in mind, though.”

So, they ate. At first it was a little awkward, they had no idea what to talk about. But then she remembered that SI didn’t produce weapons anymore and while she might not be ready to talk about herself or their life, she was curious about that.

“Tell me about Stark Industries.”

They talked all the way through dinner, leaving her a lot awed and a lot flattered, and when he left with the question if he could come back, she said yes. She was still anxious about just about anything – except, maybe, her relationship to Tony Stark. At least now she could understand a little bit. It was easy to see herself falling for a man like him. Maybe even twice, but that was not something she wanted to think about at the moment.

* * *

A few days later Ginny was just getting bored when there was a knock on the door. She called the person in and was not at all surprised when her old roommate walked through the door. Bails had always had good timing. She smiled. “Hi Bailey. It’s good to see you.” And it was. God, it was good to see a face familiar from more than a small TV-screen.

“Hey there, Ginny. Long-time no see.” The other woman was smiling, too, but she also looked a little melancholic. She barely dared to ask, but. “How long, exactly, is long?”

Bailey’s smile slipped a little, so Ginny stalled a little. “Do you want to grab a coffee from the cafeteria? It’s not great, but it gets me out of this room.” They both looked around at the private hospital room, decked out in fancy furniture and a big TV. Then they looked at each other and grinned at each other widely, if a little tiredly. 

Ginny got up, suddenly glad that she had gotten dressed in normal clothes, when she glanced at the elegant dress her old friend was wearing. 

As they made their way towards the cafeteria, Bailey threw a last look into the room. “So, what’s it like living the big life?”

Ginny hesitated. It wasn’t like she knew how to answer that. Pepper Potts may be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and the fiancée of one of the richest men alive, but she was just Ginny. The last bed she remembered sleeping in before the accident was from Ikea with sheets from the dollar store. “I. chrm. I don’t know. That room. It’s insane. I. I don’t even remember ever having enough money in the bank to pay for a weekend in Disney world and now I’m supposed to have enough money to buy Disney world? I just- I don’t know what to think about that!”

“Right, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-” Ginny stopped her by putting a hand on her arm. “It’s alright. I guess we’re both a little freaked out by this whole situation, huh?”

“Yeah,” she chuckled a little, “It has been years since we talked the last time.” There was that question again, these many questions that had been echoing inside her head since the moment Tony Stark had walked through the door instead of her best friend. What was going on? Why hadn’t Bailey come? How long had it been since she had last spoken to the girl that had been the closest thing to family she had had. But she decided to let that rest, at least until they sat down and had a hot beverage in front of them. 

It took almost another twenty minutes, spent in semi-awkward silence, before they finally made it to a free table by the big window front, and when she finally sat down, she was actually pretty glad that she could rest again. It turned out that after sleeping for eight days, you were easily winded even after walking to the cafeteria to get coffee. 

“So, if you don’t mind me asking, what is the last thing you remember?”

She grabbed her cup a little tighter. “Sorry, you don’t have to answer that. We can talk about something else.”

“No. It’s alright. It’s just, the last thing I remember- it’s so insane, sometimes I’m not sure that it’s something that actually happened.” For a moment she stared into the mug, before finally talking again. 

“The very last thing I remember is a car crash. Not a real car crash, not like the pictures I’ve seen from this one. But my hands were shaking, and I could barely see the street. God, I was a wreck.”

Bailey was frowning. “Why?”

“Right, so it was a totally ordinary Tuesday. I was checking over some documents and there’s this one really stupid mistake. It’s- it was just baffling. So, I check from whose desk that doc came, you know, see who the fuck in this company needs a math tutor and it says it came directly from Stark.” She doesn’t even notice that she has called him by his last name before she saw Bailey. Hastily she continued.

“Right, so I was convinced that this has to be a mistake. Only Tony Stark doesn’t make mistakes with finances. So, this has to be a test of some kind. I still don’t know how I came to that conclusion, but by that time I had tried to make sense of these numbers for ages. So, I go up there, to his office, because it’s an open secret that he stays late half the time he’s there. I get up there and I just start lecturing him. I don’t know what I was thinking. I barely remember a third of what I hurled at his head. What I do remember is that someone called security. When I see these two hunks coming at me, I start rummaging in my handbag and I scream at them that I have Pepper Spray and that I’m willing to use it if they don’t let me finish. Then I turn around and Tony is there, laughing his ass off. The next thing I know he’s calling me-”

“Pepper.” Ginny put her hands down, just now noticing that she had been gesticulating wildly. 

“Yeah, how did you know?” For a moment there is that awkward silence again.

“The whole world calls you that. Pepper Potts.” _Right_. God it was weird, knowing that the world knew who she was. Knowing that the world called her _Pepper_.

“Anyway. I just started realising what I had done when I was already in the car on the way home. That’s why I almost had an accident. But everything after that.” She helplessly shrugged with her shoulders. “It’s like I know there's a big chunk of something missing, but it’s all behind this impenetrable fog. I can’t reach it.”

“What did the doctors say?”

She shrugged again. “They won’t say anything definitively. Said to give it time and that they might come back on their own time.”

“Or not?”

“Or not.”

“What happened after that?” Ginny finally asked.

“I don’t really remember that evening, really. I didn’t think it was that big a deal, especially because you didn’t tell me the whole story then. The next night, though. God that was one to remember. I came home and you were sitting there, drinking Whisky and staring into nothing. At first, I thought I had misjudged the day before. That you had gotten fired after all. You’d been really worried about that that night. When you finally saw me, you just looked up and said, ‘he offered me a job’. And that was that.”

“What do you mean ‘that was that’?”

“I don’t know. You became his PA, or as you called it, his personal minder. You were barely home after that. Either you were at Stark’s house or his company, or you were travelling with him all over the world. When you were home, we fought a lot. I was sick of always being alone and of you not doing your share of the cleaning.” 

“Oh. I’m sorry?”

“It’s alright.” She was laughing. “It wasn’t just your fault. I guess I was jealous. From one day to the other you were making all this money; you were travelling all over the world. You were catapulted to the top, just like that. It didn’t help that we were both overworked, so not too long after, you moved out.”

“How long after?”

“Probably about half a year after you had gotten the job. It was for the best at the moment. But I’m glad that you called.”

“I’m glad you came. You’re the only person around I actually know.”

“That must be weird. Having people around who know you when you have no idea who they are.”

“They don’t know me. They know this other person I’ve become. This uber-confident, uber-successful woman that I don’t know.”

They were both silent, then. 

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Well, apparently I can just google what _I_ did the last fifteen years. What were you up to?”

So, the rest of the time they were catching up on what Bailey had done with her life. Apparently getting married and slaying in a marketing and PR firm. 

They sat for a while, drinking way more coffee than Ginny’s doctors would be happy with and talking. It was a little weird, because Bailey decidedly didn’t look like the young women that she remembered and because Bailey hadn’t actually spoken with her for a long, long time, but they had managed. Ginny was only glad to have someone in her life she actually remembered. Bailey seemed happy, too, because before she had to leave, they made plans to meet up again soon. Hopefully, she’d be out of the hospital by then.

* * *

Shortly after the visit from Bailey, she was allowed to go home.

She was dreading it.

She was sure normally patients were relieved when they were allowed to go home, but she was equally sure that they didn’t go home with people they didn’t remember knowing. She had actual sleepless nights about how she was supposed to behave. Where she was supposed to sleep. Oh god where was she supposed to sleep. Because the Tony Stark she remembered was a playboy through and through and she did not want to sleep in the same room as him. But the man that had visited her, who had sat by her side most of the time she had been unconscious if the nurses were to be believed, that man seemed really nice and kind and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. And she was spiralling, was well aware of the fact that half those fears didn’t even make sense – Tony had _told_ her that, of course, he didn’t expect them to just go back to whatever normal had been – and yet, here she was.

God this was all so unfair. 

As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. As soon as they reached the Penthouse of the tower -that belonged to her, and who could even believe this all - Tony led her down the hall with the words “I’ll show you your room.”

She followed him to the room but as soon as she was inside, she had to stop. He had said he would show her _her_ room, but what he clearly meant was that he would show her _their_ room. She swallowed. He clearly wasn’t planning on sleeping in here with her, there was a bag standing next to the door with a few clothes in it.

It was still very much their room. There were pictures standing on a small dresser, pictures of them. Sometimes just the two of them, sometimes there were other people. The doors to the walk-in-closet were open and she could see clothes that were obviously hers and clothes that were just as obviously not.

The longer they stood in the room in silence, the more uncomfortable Tony looked. Soon enough he bolted out of the room with a hasty “If you need anything else, ask me, or FRIDAY.” Then he was gone.

Slowly she made her way through the room. Tony had dropped her bag by the bed, and she decided to let it stay there for the moment. Instead, she went to have a closer look at the photographs.

She had googled Tony while in the hospital. There were a lot of things on the internet - and how different it was than 15 years ago- but soon she had been overwhelmed by all the information and had just switched over to the images.

The Tony Stark that could be found there was still bigger than life, but in a wholly different way. He was clearly older than the man she remembered, even if he still had the good looks. Other than the younger Tony, who had been in the tabloids with models on his arms, heading into parties and hotel rooms, this Tony had been photographed at galas, science-conventions and battlefields. And when there was a woman on his arm, it was always her.

The pictures here were even more different. These were private photos, like the ones her grandma had collected in a photo album. The first one she picked up showed her and Tony. They were kissing, and the fireworks in the background suggested that it was New Year’s Eve. She could just barely see the way they were both smiling into the kiss and promptly put the frame back down. 

The next one she didn’t even pick up. It was Tony, again, but this time with Colonel Rhodes, who already featured as Tony’s companion in the time she could remember – then usually being seen first partying with his best friends and then dragging him out of those parties. Then came one of her with a woman she didn’t recognize. Then came one of Tony with- she stopped short. That was a kid. Not older than fifteen or sixteen. Maybe younger. 

She carefully lifted the frame and sat on the bed, still keeping her eyes on the photo. 

Tony was half sitting half lying on the couch she had just walked by in the living room. The teenager was leaning on Tony, sleeping, and it was the most adorable thing she had ever seen. The man’s face was all soft and loving. This had little to do with the pictures she had found on the internet. The man the world got to see looked at the people he cared for with adoration and admiration and love, but this was a completely different level. 

Then there was the fact that in almost a decade worth of published photos she had clicked through over the last week, there hadn’t been a hint of a child. She could just barely remember how many scandals there had been with rumours of Tony Stark having an illegitimate child, but at some point, the tabloids had stopped spending too much time on the topic, because it was never true. Looking at this picture, though, she wondered if maybe there had been one that had more truth to it than the others. A man like Tony Stark would easily have enough resources to hide things from nosy reporters. 

She carefully put the picture on the nightstand and lay down.

This was the most comfortable bed she had ever slept in; it still took her ages to fall asleep.

Waking up the next morning, she felt as if she was still dreaming. Everything just felt- surreal. She had slept surprisingly well. Much better than she had in the hospital, even with the nervousness she felt about living here. But even after all the comforts in her hospital room, the bedroom in a Manhattan penthouse was weird.

The weirdness kept on coming. From waking up to the sight over the city, walking into a closet, which was enough of a trip already, to getting questions she mumbled to herself answered by the AI that lived in her ceiling. Even weirder that that was who she found in the kitchen, though. She had wandered a few floors down after taking one look at the coffee machine and deciding that she wasn’t ready to try that. The AI, FRIDAY, had said that there was coffee to be found in the team’s kitchen, and so she had headed for the elevator.

She had taken one step into the room when she had noticed that Captain fucking America stood there; she almost turned around and walked right out again.

Too late, he had already noticed her. “Good morning.” Damn that was a bright smile.

Ginny wasn’t half as awake, yet, so she only nodded. She spotted the coffee almost immediately. The coffee machine was the same spaceship-like model as upstairs, but there already was a pot of fresh coffee, so it didn’t matter.

After a cup she was already thinking more clearly. While she was down there, she might as well eat something.

“There’s sandwiches in the fridge if you’d like some.” Were all the people here mind readers?

“Thank you.”

Sitting at a table and sharing breakfast with Captain America was less weird than she would have thought. She herself hadn’t ever read the comics, even if she had been aware of them, so it was easy to pretend that he was just a normal man.

“How are you doing?” Well, so much for a mind reader. She had kinda hoped they didn’t have to talk about that.

“I’m fine. The Doctors said I have a good chance that my memories will come back, so right now I’m mostly trying to stay positive.”

He nodded. “If there’s anything I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

“I will, thanks.”

“You and Tony have done so much for the team. It’s the least I could do.”

She smiled a little forced. She didn’t remember doing these things and that made the whole thing just awkward for everyone. She wouldn’t have ever come back on that if she hadn’t remembered the pictures in the bedroom. Tony tried to hide it, but he hurt every time she asked something that she should have known. He answered always, and always patiently, but he couldn’t quite hide the open wound behind his eyes. Maybe asking Rogers would be easier on everyone.

“There is one thing.” Rogers looked back up again. “I found pictures upstairs. There was a boy in them. Only about fifteen, I think.” Understanding rushed over Rogers’s face.

“His name is Peter. He’s Tony’s son.” So, she’d been right. He waited to see how she’d react to that, but he could wait a long time for that; she had now idea how to react to that.

It was one thing, one already very enormous thing, to forget that that she had wanted to marry Tony Stark. It was quite another to realise that she had been ready to become someone’s Stepmother. To take responsibility for a teenager. She was only 28 for god’s sake, that wasn’t old enough to parent a teenager. Only, she wasn’t 28. This whole thing was just so weird she could cry.

Before she had to actually think of an answer, the elevator doors opened again to reveal Tony. She had thought the atmosphere in the kitchen had been awkward before, but as soon as the doors opened the level went way up. Still better than having to continue that train of thought, though.

Tony stepped closer until he stood as close to her as he could without touching her.

“Rogers.”

Rogers nodded. “Tony.”

“Have you been telling compromising stories about me, Rogers?” She wasn’t sure if he actually meant it or if he was just teasing; Rogers was obviously of the opinion that he was serious, he looked horrified.

“I wouldn’t. I really wouldn’t.” Out of the corner of her eye she could see Tony’s shoulder relaxing a little. So, he had really been worried about that. That was curious. She had mostly ignored the Avengers during her internet searches, the man inside the armour had interested her far more than Iron Man. But she had still noticed that the team seemed to be close, friends, at least. She put it on her mental list of things to google.

Which turned out sooner rather than later, when first Rogers and then Tony fled the kitchen within minutes.

And, boy, she was glad she had. That whole civil war mess was insane. And if she realised anything over the last week, it was that if they had halfway decent press people, the media wasn’t informed half as good as they liked to believe. There was almost certainly a lot more to discover if she cared to ask.

Everyone knew about the fight in Berlin, but as to what had happened after, there were only speculations. Reports said that despite everything the two men who had just left had been still amiable towards each other until something had happened. Since the ‘rogues’ had come back, they had been distant at best, and that was only in public. What she had just witnessed had looked more like badly hidden bitterness. She decided on the spot that she would keep out of the whole affair. She had probably had an opinion on it, but she had definitively also had more information than she could google now. Besides that, she had enough things to worry about right then. First, she had to repair her own life and relationships, then she could look into other people’s.  
  


* * *

It didn’t take long before she met Peter. That wasn’t hard, because apparently, he lived with them.

On her second evening in the penthouse, she had taken the photograph of Tony and Peter into the living room. Tony, who had spent the last two days keeping out of her way, came through the door at exactly the time that FRIDAY had specified for her. He froze when he walked in- he seemed prone to doing that around her.

“I would ask if I forgot an important date, but then you wouldn’t remember either, right now.” He winced. He did that a lot, too. She had to laugh, though. A lot. She couldn’t stop laughing. God, this was the first time anyone hadn’t spoken about her memory loss with pity. She hadn’t realised how much that had been grating on her.

When she finally stopped, barring a few giggles that kept slipping out, Tony was staring at her a little bewildered, but he was also smiling.

“I think that’s the first time I have seen you laugh for two weeks.”

“Come sit with me for a moment.” He did, and all words left her.

“I- We-“ A deep breath. “You’ve been avoiding me.” He nodded. “Why?”

“I guess- I guess I wanted to give you space. I didn’t want you to think that I was – expecting anything. From you.” Apparently, she wasn’t the only one who was a little hyper conscious of his old reputation.

“What _do_ you expect, then? How do you imagine what’s going to happen, right now?”

Tony shrugged. “Honestly, I’m not sure. I’m really holding out for your memories to come back. Until then. I don’t know.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“WHAT? No! No, I’d very much like you to stay. I just wasn’t sure if you’d want to. You. Well, as much as I hate it, right now you don’t even know me. I would understand if you didn’t want to live with me. Right now.” He tacked the last bit on as if he wasn’t sure if he should allow himself to hope that their situation would change again. Return to normal, as he knew it. She rather hoped the same. Her life sounded complicated, and sometimes a little exhausting, but also very, very awesome.

“I want my memories to come back, too. But maybe until then, we could just start getting to know each other again?” Fuck Rogers, this was the brightest smile she had ever seen.

“Sure. What do you want to know?”

She pulled out the frame she had stashed between the couch and her leg. Tony took it easily from her. For some reason, that made her smile.

“I found this in the bedroom. I like it. Tell me about him?” And he did. He spoke for almost half an hour without pause. His voice was so full of obvious adoration and love that she would have known then that this was Tony’s kid, even if Rogers hadn’t told her yesterday.

“Do I get to meet him?”

“He’ll be back tomorrow. He stayed at a friend’s place the last week, but now that everything’s calmed down a bit, he’s coming here again.”

“Oh. I didn’t realise that he was living here.” She really hadn’t, though she definitively should have.

“He doesn’t usually. He’s with May, normally, but she went to some training thing for work- out of state. These people are fucking unreasonable. But it meant a better chance of promotion and better pay, so Pete has been staying here for a couple of weeks.” Ah, she also hadn’t realised that Tony was in contact with Peter’s mother. Though she really, _really_ should have. She decided not to voice that out loud though.

The next morning, she thought Tony had better not told her that she was going to meet he once – and maybe again – future stepson. The last time she had been so nervous had been he very last exam at college.

At least she didn’t have time to fret too long. Tony must have gotten up ridiculously early to get the kid; at 8 am they were already back. She was glad that she had always been an early riser, breakfast was half ready by then.

The boy was about Tony’s height already. He looked like him, too. More than she had realised in the photo. ‘And,’ she thought with relief, ‘he looks just as nervous as me.’

“Hello, Peter. It’s nice to meet you again.” He chuckled a little unsure at that.

“Hello Pe – Vir-. It’s nice to see you again Miss Potts. I’m glad that you are okay.”

What a polite kid he was. He didn’t get that from Tony, that much she knew.

He did share a lot of other mannerisms with his father, though.

They both eyed their eggs critically – apparently not one person in their extended family was anything near a good cook – they both held their cutlery rather like appliances from down in the workshop, which Peter called a lab, much to Tony’s obvious disgust, and they were both obviously desperate to get to work. They were gone as soon as the last plate was washed and dried.

Ginny didn’t mind. She liked Peter, he was a cute, excited kid, but she was also glad to have a little time for herself, to readjust her idea of what her live had been like, yet again.

* * *

It took only a few weeks for the first memories to return. The first, as Tony had assured her he would always hold against her, with the biggest smile on his face, was of meeting Rhodey for the first time. After that, it was annoyingly irregular. Sometimes she would spend days waiting to remember something new, and then get a memory back when she wasn’t thinking about it. That should probably tell her something, but it wasn’t exactly easy to not wait for every single bit of her old life to come back.

Bailey was always a welcome distraction. They met for coffee almost twice a week, when they could manage. The first of those meetings had been wild, she had to say. Sitting down and opening with, “I didn’t know I was going to be a stepmom” had probably been a bad idea.

“Is that a new meme that I don’t know about?” Bailey was utterly unamused by memes. Ginny liked them, they were quite funny, even if she didn’t get half of them.

“No, I mean it. No one thought to mention that Tony has a kid when they told me that I wanted to marry him.”

“Tony Stark doesn’t have a child.”

“Yes, he does. I met him only a few days ago. He’s the sweetest kid ever.” Something flashed through Baileys eyes, then, but she couldn’t decipher what it was.

“You’re serious.”

“I’m serious.”

“Tell me everything.”

And she did.

A couple of months into the coffee meetups, they changed to dinner once a week. Pepper was rather glad. She had gotten more and more of her memories back, even if there were still entire years missing. But the more she turned back into her old-new self, the more she thought that something was off with their relationship. She wondered if Bailey was jealous of her, or maybe she noticed that Pepper kept her and the rest of her life mostly separate. There wasn’t really a reason, just that it felt weird to mix the old and the new.

She still told her just about everything. Even if she had gotten closer with the people in her life again, Bailey was still her oldest friend. She had also became something of a therapist.

“I really think he doesn’t like me,” she said, probably for the hundredth time.

“What happened now?” Bails sounded a little annoyed, but Pepper couldn’t fault her that. She sometimes opened with that line bi-weekly.

“He and Tony were in the workshop-“

“You still haven’t shown me pictures of that, you know?” Pepper neatly overheard the throw-in comment. She would’ve if Bailey wouldn’t be so goddamn pushy about it.

“It was way past late, already early again, so I went to drag them out to sleep.”

“So, what’s the problem? He didn’t listen to you?”

“No, that’s the problem. He did immediately. Tony says that normally he pouts and charms until he’s got enough extra time to at least finished what he’s working on right that moment. But he didn’t even look at me, just went to bed.”

“That doesn’t sound like a problem to me.”

It had to Tony. He’d tried to hide it, but she knew that he had been a little weirded out by that, too.

“And then I accidentally heard him talking to May on the phone.” That made her friend listen again. She knew she sounded glum, but she couldn’t help it. She had met the woman the first time when she had come to collect Peter from them. When she had made it to the door, the biggest tumult had already calmed down again, but she had still seen May hug Tony way longer than was appropriate for a greeting. She supposed they had been lovers, once.

“And what did you hear on this _accidental_ listening in?”

“I really didn’t mean to!”

“Yeah, yeah. Now spill.”

“I heard them saying my name, so I went over. May said something to Peter like he should keep his distance. To remember that I don’t know him, right now. I think she went on, but I left, then. Do you think she doesn’t trust me with her son? Do you think she’ll get to Tony with that”?

Bailey snickered. “And there we have the root of the problem. You’re jealous. You don’t like that Stark still has contact with his ex, and you’re projecting those feelings onto the poor kid. Can we change the topic now?”

“Yeah, sorry, of course.”

Bailey started telling her about her PA again - she called him her secretary, but he clearly did more than that. Pepper didn’t really listen. She was still preoccupied with her comment on the situation.

Pepper wasn’t an idiot. She knew that she was jealous. It was really quite ridiculous. The man was her fiancé. He had told her more than once that he really wanted things to go back to them being together, that he still wanted to marry her, if she was still interested. And she was, technically.

She was just feeling a weird disconnect between the depth of her feelings for him that she remembered occasionally, with the really good memories, and the utter lack of knowledge of how she had fallen so deeply in love with the man. Still, he was the surest of sure things, and still she was behaving like a pre-teen with her first crush.

She thought Bailey shouldn’t just throw all of her problems into one pot, she couldn’t help but sound a little annoyed herself, if only inside her head. Precisely because she was aware of her jealously, she knew that the thing with Peter required a different solution.

Their meetings weren’t just therapy sessions, though, but also exceptionally good distractions from things she didn’t want to think about for a while. Therefore, and still with a little sigh, she tuned back into the adventures of Bailey and the PA that could, according to Bails, move entire mountain chains with one phone call.

* * *

Pepper sat in the Avenger’s common room because it was the one room where she could sit and enjoy the view of New York City at night without wondering if she had sat in the very same spot before and start wondering if she had a favourite spot to sit and look at the view. But Tony had told her that he only ever spent time down here when there were team nights, and that Pepper seldom came down and never spent any time there.

Of course, on the flipside, she couldn’t guarantee that she would be alone.

“May I?” said a voice over her shoulder.

She glanced over and was only mildly surprised that Captain America was standing behind her, a mug in one hand and a blanket in the other. For a moment she was mostly apprehensive. But Steve might be the best person to answer the questions that had driven her out here in the first place tonight. He could perhaps relate to her the easiest and even if he and Tony were fighting, he knew him well. So, she nodded.

Rogers settled next to her and they both stared silently across the city.

“What brings you out here?” she finally asked.

“It’s quiet. I like that after a busy day.”

“Well, then I’m sorry that I interrupted the quiet.”

“What? No, no, please don’t! Really, if anything, I should apologize.”

“That is between you and Tony. I’m staying out if that, right now.”

Steve looked at her a little calculating. “Do you remember- what happened?”

She snorted. “I might not have the most of my memories, but I do know how to google, you know. It’s really not that hard.”

“Right, sorry.” They turned back to the skyline.

“How _is_ it going between the two of you?”

“I thought you wanted to stay out of it?” He was smiling, though.

“Just because I don’t have the capacity to invest myself into your drama right now, doesn’t mean I don’t care about Tony.”

“Fair enough.” He sighed. “I honestly don’t know. It’s going as well as could be expected, I guess. We don’t spend much time together, but then, even if we don’t take into account that we are on – strange – terms right now. He is of course spending a lot of time with Peter. And I don’t think he wants me anywhere near the kid, which” he sighed, “Fair enough. Again.”

“Have you met him?” She hadn’t actually meant to ask that. She had wanted to talk about something that had nothing to do with her worries right now. Apparently, that wasn’t in the cards right now.

“A few times. First time in the middle of the night, I brought him by the ‘shop after I found him in the gym. I’m pretty sure that he called him ‘dad’ for the first time then. The _look_ on Tony’s face.”

“How was he when you saw him?”

“Energetic. Excited. A lot like a puppy.”

He didn’t ask why she had wanted to know, even though he was looking at her curiously. They kept their eyes on the skyline. Maybe that was why she decided to talk. With Bailey it had started to feel like gossiping instead of talking out her problems with a friend whenever she started on topics like Tony or Peter. With Rogers – it felt calmer. Like he was actually just listening.

“I think he doesn’t like me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. There are no pictures of us together. Not even with all three of us. He sometimes calls me Miss Potts, as if he has to bring himself to call me by my first name. And a hundred different things. I just get the impression that we didn’t spent time together, before the accident.”

“Mhm.”

“What does that mean?”

“Have you talked to Tony about this?”

That actually made her laugh, but it wasn’t a happy one. “I scarcely know where I stand with him. I don’t know if I want to go to him for help with a better relationship with his son, when we just really started talking to each other. But then I think how I ever imagined a marriage to work out if I can’t even hold a five-minute conversation with Peter.”

For a while they say nothing. Pepper wasn’t sure if there even was more to be said, because this was it, wasn’t it? That was the hole thing she was afraid of. It wasn’t the same as loosing her memories had been. That had been a shock quick and sharp like a bucket full of ice water over her head. But the Doctors had told her they would probably come back on their own and they had already started to. There might be some that she would never remember but everyone forgot things, so that was okay. The thing with Peter, though. She had no experts telling her that everything would be fine or how or make it better. It certainly wouldn’t resolve itself with time. And – perhaps worst of all – she didn’t think Tony would understand, because, yes, he had met Peter only when he was a teenager and sometimes things were a little awkward between them, but he was a natural. He didn’t see it himself, but everyone who spent a few minutes with them knew that he loved Peter.

“Have you considered that maybe Peter feels the same way about you?”

“I- what?”

“I was just thinking. It is a complicated situation, isn’t it? You basically said you don’t know how to interact with them, separately or together, because you don’t know them, and they are so close. I guess that’s only natural, but the thing is, only a year or two ago, Peter probably felt the exact same way. You and Tony, you were always weirdly in sync.”

“I became really good at reading what he thought and wanted after he let me book things and then cancel later or deny invitations only to then want to go later. After about ten weeks I just stopped asking him what he wanted to do and guessed what he _would_ want to do.” And _huh_ she hadn’t even known that she knew that.

Steve smiled. “It’s the other way around, too, though. People who met you guys, at least the ones who didn’t already know what they wanted to see beforehand – everyone could always tell how much he loves you. His mindreading probably isn’t as good as yours, but then whose is?” That made her laugh for real this time.

“I’m just saying, you were always a united front. And to imagine Peter coming here, trying to get to know his dad, but also you, he must have felt pretty similarly. He and Tony could use science as a starting point, go from there. Maybe he just didn’t know what to talk to you about.”

She had never considered that, but now that he had said it, it seemed plausible. She had been worried about butting in in an existing relationship, and maybe Peter, too, had felt like an intruder in her life. Worried about taking Tony’s time from her like she worried about taking it from him. Jesus, this was a mess. But maybe finally a mess that she could organise and then work through. And she thrived on being able to organise things..

They sat there for a while longer, until her hot chocolate had grown cold and she had sorted her thoughts enough to no longer be nervous about going back up to the penthouse. In standing up, she put her hand on Steve’s arm. “Thank you.”

He smiled up at her. “I’m just glad I could help.”

“Good Night, Steve.”

“Good Night.”

* * *

Pepper didn’t know why she kept coming to Bailey. In the beginning it had been the only thing to keep her going. Not knowing any of the people that were in her live had been exhausting and no matter why they hadn’t had contact anymore, at that point she had desperately needed the connection to the young women she felt like, something that didn’t have to do with the powerful CEO she supposedly was now.

But she had started remembering. Little by little the memories had come back. Mostly little, every-day things. A conversation about omelettes in a plane. Coming home after work and having dinner with Tony. They were all precious to her and she horded the steadily growing pile of memories jealously. The big things were taking their time, though.

But with every little memory that came back, little tensions started appearing in her relationship with Bailey.

One night they had been out to dinner. Pepper had been excited. It had been the first time she had come back into her own life enough to be comfortable spending the kind of money they had. She had wanted to share this with Bailey, had taken her out for a girl’s night. Bailey had been in a mood the whole evening, though. In the end, the whole thing had just been exhausting.

It hadn’t even gotten better after that. She almost got the impression that her friend resented every memory she got back. But she had not been quite ready to give up, yet. Bailey had told her that last time around she had gotten too busy with Tony’s live to keep track of the people in her own, and she was determined to do better this time. Plus, Bailey was the only friend she had outside that tight knit Stark circle, and while Steve had helped, she wanted to talk her revelations through with a friend, one last time.

So, this was why she was standing in her friend’s office in a marketing firm now, waiting for Bailey to finish her meeting.

Her PA had assured her that it was fine for her to wait in the office. Pepper was a little uncomfortable, though. She had noticed the way people reacted to her. She had gotten used to it, but she was still not always sure why people did things for her. Had Bailey told him to invite her in, or was the young man just terrified of letting _Pepper Potts_ wait in the hall?

Before she could doubt the situation any longer, the man came back, a cup of coffee in his hand.

“Here you go, Miss Potts. Miss Benedict said you should make yourself comfortable, the meeting will be running late. But she said she would hurry as best she could.” And he put the mug in the glass table in front of an uncomfortable, but expensive, looking sofa. Well, that answered her question at least. He was a good PA, competent, after everything Bailey had told her, and apparently good at reading people, if he had noticed her hesitation to actually sit down.

“Thank you- “She hesitated.

“Alexander, ma’am”

“It’s Pepper, please. Thank you, Alexander.”

He vanished again and Pepper sat down. The sofa really was uncomfortable. And it stood with the back to the window, which was just stupid. She let her eyes wander through the room, looking for anything that would make the wait more interesting. There wasn’t much to see, a notebook on the table in front of her, probably business notes.

Her eyes kept wandering and then snapped back. Something had caught her attention about the notes, but it took her a moment to realise- there it was, a name. _Stark._

Pepper frowned. Tony had told her that they had no business with Bailey’s firm. What could she possibly be writing down to do with him? She looked a little closer.

‘P. is falling for him again. Stark is still distant. Doesn’t talk to her about Jr.’

Her vision blurred as pure steel bled down her spine. She didn’t even feel dread, or doubt. There was little to be misunderstood about notes like that. She skipped past the shock and the hurt. The steel was much more comfortable, right now.

For other people, anger was hot and raging, but Pepper’s anger had always been hard and cold as ice. As a child she had imagined it like steel, running down her spine and into her limbs, hardening around her bones. It had been amusing to her to realise that apparently, she had found a man who knew the feeling, had pulled it right out of his body and let it encase him in a real armour. The man of steel and the woman who wore her anger as an exoskeleton out of it.

She might not remember much, but she remembered how hard it had been to find people that would not spill everything about her to the press the minute they got the chance. It seemed she had finally discovered what had happened between her and Bailey all those years ago, but that was something she could look into later.

Right now, she put down the mug and took the notebook instead. She needed to know what else was in there.

Fifteen minutes later, the door opened. The steel in Pepper’s bones, that had warmed a little over the last five minutes grew cold again. She stood up, looked at Bailey and then, demonstratively, at the book. The woman in front of her paled. Pepper nodded. That was all she needed. She put the book into her handbag and stood.

“You should think very carefully about what you’ll do next. Whatever it is, make sure to never contact me again.”

Bailey obviously didn’t know what to say, and Pepper didn’t wait until she had figured it out. She reserved that kind of patience for people she actually liked.

She practically stormed out of the office, was almost down the entire hall, when- “Pepper?”

For one wild moment she thought Bailey had the audacity- but it wasn’t Bailey. It was Alexander, who had shot up from his chair, looking a little worried, a little tense. She turned and looked at him. It was a gamble, but she had learned to trust her gut over the last few months.

It was six steps, then she stood right in front of his desk.

“Did you know about it?”

“About what?” Pepper made sure to look closely, but he seemed genuine.

She took out the book, opened it up on a random page and held it up for him to read. His eyes flickered between her face and the book a few times, then he read. That was definitively real shock.

“This is a marketing/ _PR_ firm. What journalists does she usually work with?”

Alexander’s eyes flickered again, this time to the door to Bailey’s office. Maybe it had been too much to ask. He could lose his job for something like that, but she had to at least try, she thought that maybe-

“I can’t possibly tell you that, Miss Potts. I’m sorry.” He didn’t raise his voice to be heard in the office, sounded more distant, more so, at least, then when he had called after her. She almost believed him, except that he threw her a _look._ He bent down to his computer and within a few seconds, the printer spit out two pages.

“I understand,” she said, the same way he had, while taking the pages from him. She put them into the notebook and put that into her bag. While she was at it, she rummaged a little and- there.

“I’m in the market for a new PA. I’m not promising anything, but if you’re interested, we’ll get you an interview. I like your style.” And she handed him her business card. It vanished into his pocket before she could blink.

Without waiting for another reaction, she hastened to the elevator. She needed to talk to Tony about this. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After everything she worked through here, all her anxiety about being a step mom, I really wish that Pete really was Tony's bio son. But then, it'll probably still make their realtionship better, so it's okay.  
> This also got a little more concentrated on Pepper than I would have thought, but I guess with memory loss as a plot... that needed to be resolved, and that was how it worked out.  
> Plus, this sets up the last chapter right like I wanted it to. Can you guess what's going to happen?


End file.
